


LUNAR

by Djarin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Awkward Flirting, Awkward Tension, BAMF Reader, Din Djarin Needs a Hug, Din Djarin POV, Din Djarin is horny af, F/M, Good Parent Din Djarin, Hand Jobs, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, POV Third Person, Pining, Protective Din Djarin, Reader-Insert, Semi-Slow Burn, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Size Difference, Smut, Soft Din Djarin, Touch-Starved, Touch-Starved Din Djarin, honestly just give the man a hug ok, no y/n, season 1 timeline, sharpshooter reader, smut starts chapter 7, we all touch-starved in this bitch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:40:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 37,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29277084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Djarin/pseuds/Djarin
Summary: The Mandalorian is a driven warrior — traversing the galaxy in search of the ancient Jedi — but everyone has their weaknesses, and he’s no different. The Bounty Hunter possessed three in fact. One he’s discovered—The Child. The remaining two, though, he wasn’t aware of their existence. At least, not until he meets a valorous Sharpshooter underneath a moonless night sky; then he’s plummeting down a dark mission of self-discovery, questioning his morals and his Creed while the moon taunts him, the phases of the satellite corresponding to his personal revelations. However, the Girl has a dark past that may come to inflict hardships on the Mandalorian and the Child; it's up to the Bounty Hunter to decide her fate.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Original Female Character(s), Din Djarin/Reader, Din Djarin/You, The Mandalorian/Reader
Comments: 57
Kudos: 112





	1. Arvala-7

**Author's Note:**

> Attempting to write a third-person POV with a reader insert, so let's see how this turns out! 
> 
> Content warning: this fic will eventually have graphic scenes involving blood, gore, and smut.

The Razor Crest is the closest thing to The Mandalorian’s home, there wasn’t a situation the spacecraft hadn’t emerged triumphant albeit attaining minimal scathes of blaster fire. She’s an old vessel commissioned sometime before the Galactic Empire’s formation, the Mandalorian is grateful he’s privileged to possess such a durable warship, it compliments his style perfectly.

Although, as the craft whines at Mando’s persistent thumbing of controls, he was beginning to resent the body of duralloy surrounding him. The walls shake violently against the atmospheric changes and the left engine slows to a stop, crashing against a stray object within the propellers. He fights against the increasing velocity, eager on  _ not  _ crashing into the all-too-familiar dusty planet nearing closer.

He hopes Kuiil is accepting of a visitor.

Mando surveys the gunship before him, a piece of exterior panelling collapses to the ground underneath the resting Crest and the whirs of a slowing engine clash against the whistling wind, and he sighs. It’s not an easy fix, not this time. The Guild is increasing the numbers against him and with it, the blaster fire directed towards him has improved; pilots are becoming gallant, stupid, credit-hungry.

At least he’s a good pilot, a skill he feels pride for possessing.

Even so, the Crest is a bulky hull and his skills can’t avoid the few unfortunate circumstances that come with it. The spacecraft is in bad shape, worst it’s ever been in and he fears even the Ugnaught cannot assist with this, but he can’t waste time - can’t stay in one location for too long. If his short time on Sorgan taught him anything, it’s to not allow himself attachments nor liabilities. 

Arvala-7 hasn’t changed — hasn’t improved — since he was last here, collecting the asset for a hefty reward that now encases his body. The asset — The Child, remained in the sleeping berth, undeterred by the convulsions. Mando contemplates not to wake him and visit Kuiil for assistance, but he’s reminded of Peli Motto’s stern words— _ You can’t just leave a child all alone like that!  _

Regardless of the fact the planet is a deserted wasteland, he knows she’s right.

Besides, if the Jawa’s were to ransack the Crest  _ again _ , they might use the Child as a bargaining chip.

Substrate crunches underneath Mando’s weighted boots as he nears the boarding ramp to collect the Child. The tips of his toes reach the incline but he stops, pauses, thinks. There’s a shift in the wind before it settles flatly, dissipating as though it never existed. It’s silent, dead, until it wasn’t. There’s a sharp hiss echoing through the valleys, one he’s heard too many times and he promptly turns to catch a streak of burning red an inch away from his visor and nestling a hole into the battered ship.

Mando scans the bouldered landscape and concurrently keys at his vambrace, activating his thermal vision to assist in his hunt for the perpetrator; thankful for the night sky enhancing the opportunity. He stops short, visor targeting a glimmer of warm orange heat on the rocky peaks. Mando’s hand instinctively hovers over his holstered blaster, but they’re too far, too high for him to manage a decent shot. With the rifle locked in the Crest, he’s practically defenceless albeit for the flash charges and flamethrower in his vambrace.

Resorting to flash charges in this circumstance is futile. There aren’t sufficient charges to obstruct their vision long enough for him to reach their positioning. Of course, the flamethrower is even worse; he’d consider himself lucky if it extended a mere two metres ahead of him. He’s easy pickings — too vulnerable, and it  _ intimidates him. _

He’s never felt so insignificant...so...powerless.

Leather toggles at his vambrace and the visor magnifies its vision before his eyes. Mando observes the figure, analyses it, and follows the direction of the barrel’s aim. It’s actively locked onto him, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t show submission before them.

It’s assertive and so stupid.

It’s, in all probability, a Guild member here to lay claim to two rewards—Mando, for his betrayals, and the Child, for high compensations. Although the reward for the Child alone outweighs the Mandalorian’s. They could end him right here and now, steal the Child and be back on Nevarro within a few days; they  _ should  _ for it they don’t, he  _ will  _ put up a fight.

The sharpshooter readjusts their positioning, the barrel of the rifle tilting down an inch and another blast of crimson slashes through the air, wisps of wind trailing behind the high-velocity beam. It kicks up dirt upon its impact between his boots, dust and pebbles flicking into his lower beskar.

They’re not aiming for him at all, Mando realises. It’s possible that they’re a poor marksman, but was it plausible? Their posture is riddled with years of experience and discovered confidence; they’re no amateur. Mando is sure of it.

Which means they’re attempting to threaten him, frighten him enough for him to evacuate the lands. He doesn’t submit that easily. Perhaps they were hiding something — there’s no point in empty threats among land that possesses no treasures — and maybe it was valuable, or, Mando hums in thought, maybe something sinister he shouldn’t involve himself in. 

Arvala-7 isn’t a planet of overly aggressive inhabitants, although the last he was here he  _ did  _ wipe out an entire Nikto encampment; there had to be others of their kind parading the planet in search of him. 

Even with the assistance of his magnified vision, the figure was blurred and unreadable. Mando couldn’t even see a speck of skin underneath all the body armour and their face was obstructed by hard tan rock formations.

Mando thinks of the tan-pink face of the Ugnaught, the white whiskers lining his jowls, the weathered brown goggle cap, and how he failed to mention an overly territorial sharpshooter inhabiting the lands.

_ Blast! Kriffing Ugnaught!  _

Isn’t that something a tourist should be made aware of upon entering unknown terrain?

Mando gazes through his visor and observes the prone figure. If this was any other ordinary blaster fight, he’d have won by now; would’ve simply pulled for his Amban phase-pulse rifle and disintegrated the threat until there was nothing left but their dust kicking in the wind. He would have already been heading to Kuiil’s moisture farm and complained about his lack of notice of the ambush.

It wasn’t any normal fight, though. Mando can sense something from them and he doesn’t like it; not  _ what  _ he senses but  _ why  _ he senses it.

He’s a practical man. 

He works with his hands and his mind, and doesn't tap into intuitions unless necessary. Even when he feels a job is too hard, too promising, he embraces it. Green skin and long bat-wing ears flicker in his peripherals—The Child. He’s awoken. At an unfortunate time, no less. He often did that.

Mando rushes to the Child and swoops him in his arms, ignoring the confused coos muffling into his beskar and returning to the Crest before the incoming fire. It doesn’t come, not even after he peers his helm from the duralloy walls. He inspects the valley formations for a tinge of orange heat, a speck of lens flare, but it’s gone. 

It’s a good thing —he has to remind himself — but his suspicions are wedging into the deep crevices of his mind and tingling against his brain, provoking sparks of apprehension. It’s only a matter of time before they inevitably return and who’s to say they won’t return with reinforcements, optimistic of removing him from their lands.

The Child is restless in his arms, whiny piercing noises emitting from his little mouth. “Okay, okay,” Mando grumbles, content of the long-gone presence, and sets the Child down. “Don’t go outside.” 

He thumbs his vambrace and the weapons unit doors commence their opening with creaky hinges, yet another thing Mando will have to secure at a later date. The Amban rifle feels comforting in his hand, the shiny barrel glimmering in the Crest’s light. It’s secured to his back and the thick strap fastens across his breastplate vertically, reassuringly.

Leathered digits grab at three canisters of rifle ammunition and situate them in their placements surrounding his boot, refilling the empty’s he’d used prior to the pathetic spacecraft malfunctioning. 

Mando gives himself a once-over, guaranteeing he contained all the essentials on his possession if the sharpshooter were to return. When he’s pleased with the maintenance of his blasters and positioning of ammunition canisters, he retreats the Crest and closes the hatch. “I told you not to go outside.” 

The Child coos blithely and wanders to his guardian with an extended three-tipped claw.

Mando sighs and picks up the little alien child. The beskar helmet twists towards the mountain-top and his eyes narrow underneath the visor, his lips pressed tightly against his teeth in thought.

“Come on, let’s go see Kuiil. Might even have some pestering frogs you can take off his hands.”

_ And maybe he can answer some urgent questions,  _ The Mandalorian thinks.

The Ugnaught proves to be useful yet again, going so far as to tend to the Child’s hunger needs—and offering unwanted advice in the meantime. The Mandalorian and Kuiil stand ahead of the Blurrg enclosure, his former mount jeering the beskar-clad bounty hunter. “She’s not fond of you.”

“Feelings mutual.” Mando jabs and sighs, realising his vehemence towards a non-sentient beast. The Child is beside him, shoving a cobalt-blue frog through his tight-lipped mouth. Frantic legs kick at the Child’s chin but it only encourages his appetite, green claws pushing the amphibians limbs into his enclosed mouth. Mando cringes beneath the helmet.

“I recognise you’re not here for tea.” Kuiil draws the Mandalorian’s attention back. “Why are you here?”

“The Crest has taken significant damage. I fear I cannot fix it.”

“Get a new spacecraft, a reliable one.”

Mando sighs, “I don’t need a new one.”

“I have spoken.”

The Ugnaught extends an overflowing hand of mushy grub for the blurrgs, the beasts absorb the entirety of his fist in its mouth but pulls away leaving a wet shine of slobber on Kuiil’s hand. The Mandalorian is grateful for the thin wire restraining them to their confines. Although, they were definitely capable of overpowering the loose cables with their brute strength; he’s pleased he will be needing the reptilian assistance no longer. 

It’s easier to depend on mechanics, they’re manipulatable and live beasts were not. 

“There’s a marksman in those valleys,” Mando explains.

“I am aware.”

So he did know—and didn’t warn him. “Do you know them?”

“They are one of your kind.”

This piques his interest, curiosity apparent in his fixed posture; head tilted and shoulders stiffly raised. “Mandalorian?”

“No. Independent, private.”

Mando sighs and turns away from the Ugnaught, a pair of hands landing on his hips in frustration. Helmet adjusts upwards, reaching high in the night sky, where he browses the vastness of black and speckled white. Space seems so far away without his Crest, so unreachable. Underneath the visor, his eyes collect the clusters of stars. The Mandalorian is a man of many skill sets and abilities; constellation knowledge was not one of them, yet he couldn’t tear his gaze away. He resolves to count the particles, managing to reach sixty-eight before the Child’s coos distract him. 

He's resilient, persistent. Optimistic to obtain an answer to the number of stars soaring above him.  _ Eighty-three, eighty-four—  _ The sharpshooter crosses his mind and he scowls. There’s that sensation again, that uneasiness. Intuition, suspicion.  _ Eighty…. Eighty-six?  _

The thoughts are evaded, not wanting to think about the potential danger he’s putting himself, the Child, and even Kuiil in by remaining on the desert planet—not that he had anywhere to go, but he feels as though the sharpshooter doesn’t care. They just want him gone, and it only makes the Mandalorian that much inquisitive.

Tan lower eyelids drag downwards as though they were crafted with gravity itself. He’s tired, exhausted, but he doesn’t succumb to his body’s pleads of leisure. It can wait until the Crest is soaring through space; then, and only then, with the Child dozing in his hammock he can relax, allow his muscles to recuperate, allow himself a moment's weakness.

Mando sucks in a breath through his helmet’s filter. Dry, warm, and grainy like the desert, but a refreshing change from the recycled oxygen inside the Razor Crest’s vessel.

Arvala-7’s moon is nowhere to be seen, the sky illuminated only by the dotted whites flaked through the sheet of black. It gives the sky an ominous appearance, threatening almost. Mando finds himself disorientated among the stars, a thick lump in his throat. It looked so…

_ Lifeless. _

The Mandalorian forcibly retracts his attention from the sky, but his premonition remains intact and he dabbles with it. Fiddling the edges of a conscious thought and visualising it as a bounty puck, he pictures a bright hologram emerging from it’s centre, displaying a circulating outline of orange waves. It’s a bad idea, a stupid idea, but one he can’t reject, “Their camp. Where is their camp located?”

Kuiil shakes his head, “They’re not hostile, no need to provoke them.”

“I won’t shoot first.”


	2. Confrontation

The Mandalorian had to have been travelling the vast empty lands for at least half of the night, the sun was beginning to peer over the crumbling rocks and there’s a build-up of perspiration underneath his armour. The abusive rays assault his beskar and turn the metal hot to the touch, but he doesn’t falter, doesn’t let his muscles rest in fear they may not retaliate against his demands. The desert is violent, relentless, kicking up sand ahead of him. He’s grateful for the filter within the helmet, otherwise, he’d surely be breathing in a lot of grit.

The Child definitely wouldn’t have been able to handle the wild slashes, either. Kuiil coming in clutch, yet again. Mando pictures the little green child causing havoc for the Ugnaught, collecting dust in his tunic as he escapes from the confines of the little moisture hut; he wasn’t one for small spaces, which made maintaining a satisfied alien baby  _ and  _ directional controls of the Crest a great challenge. And yet, he’d do anything for him.

The Bounty Hunter sighs, twiddling his fingers in the constraining layer of leather. Moisture was beginning to irritate his skin and he yearns to itch his palms, the backs of his hands, the soft crevices between his fingers. He doesn’t. Instead, he focuses on the terrain ahead. It’s a wide-open area with large boulders lining the surroundings in the distance, too open for a lurking camper, but perfect for a sniper. It’s got room to aim and the canyons can serve as an advantage point to survey the region. This had to be it.

They had to be nearby.

Judging by the lack of blaster fire, they weren’t aware of his presence. It was he who has the upper hand now, and it feels appropriate—correct like it should be. 

Mando perches himself behind a stranded boulder, the Amban rifle hoisted on the minerals at shoulder-height. Beskar lowers to peer through the scope, enhancing its range to allow a clean sweep of the terrain. There’s nothing but a whole lot of rough formations, grit, and—a hut? The scope’s visual flickers as he analyses the dome structure. It’s durable, made of a base layer of duracrete accompanied by durasteel platings lining the weak points. It’s not too different than Kuiil’s moisture farm, only it seemed impenetrable.

_ I won’t shoot first.  _ Mando’s reminded of his words prodding against the back of his brain, words he’s beginning to regret voicing.

Leather digits reach for the scope, two fingers twisting its base. It’s reached its ambit but the extended vision is plentiful, enabling him the opportunity to gaze through a transparisteel opening beside the entrance, which is covered with a thick sheet of fabric flapping in the wind. The inside of the structure is illuminated in orange hues—Mando eyes the gathering of candles lit in his view, then they snap to the looming shadow on the wall. Their movements are smooth, nonchalant. Unaware of the forthcoming phantom snooping on them.  _ Got you. _

The helm’s vocoder stifles the groan abandoning from the depths of his throat as he returns to his feet, rifle grasped firmly in his gloves. They’re not hostile, at least it’s what Kuiil had said and Mando had witnessed their ambitions first-hand, but years of bounty hunting had taught him never to be lacking, never let yourself get caught off-guard. Nonetheless, if that were to happen,  _ always have a fallback plan.  _ The substitute strategy is still in the works, he doesn’t have the privilege to sit around and wait. If they were to get away beneath his fingers all this work would be for nothing. The proposition will materialise before him like it always had.

The Mandalorian is too exposed in the vastness, hardly a pebble occupied the vacant land. If they were to show their cold-blooded side at a moment’s notice, he’d be done for. Perhaps the durability of the beskar could protect him long enough to flank the sharpshooter, but his weak points must be highlighted in the scope of a sniper; his throat, his sides, below the cuisses. If the shots aren’t immediately fatal, they’d present too great of an injury for him to do any damage.

He needs to work fast.

Duracrete scrapes against the back of his cloak as he makes an impact, crouching underneath the transparisteel pane above. The strap of the rifle is once again secured across his breastplate and the wooden stock lifts a foot above his head. Better use his sidearm in such closed surfaces, then again—the paralysing pulse could be of great usefulness in such a situation. 

_ Clank! Clink! Clank!  _ It resonates from inside and the Bounty Hunter chances a glance, tinted visor met with the Sharpshooter’s hunched back. They donned a hooded poncho, concealing their identity, and ivory-coloured bandages surfacing the length of their arms until they disappeared underneath the black fabric. Mando follows their hands until his eyes lock on a small canister that’d tumbled atop a wooden table, spilling fluids onto the board.

For someone who’d been so inconspicuous earlier, they sure were clumsy.

The Mandalorian uses this for if he can draw his blaster on them before they to him, overbearing questions may finally go addressed. Curves of his knees crack upon ascension and he muffles a sigh into his helmet, his body craving for prohibited movements which he ignores. He’s getting old, a reality he  _ can’t  _ ignore despite the attempts.

Blaster in his dominant hand, he swipes away the loose curtain of a door with the other and aims towards the Sharpshooter’s positioning. They’re not here. Gone. Vanished in thin air. Not a single trace of them. Even the spilled liquid had been wiped away and the canister upright on the wooden surface. The hut is compact, too small for Mando to find comfort in but large enough for an individual to live a decent life with moderate arthritis; seriously, why was the ceiling so low? A partially-made sleeping berth is compressed into the side of the wall, the wooden table on the parallel and scattered mechanisms lined the free space. 

Leather fiddles with the hilt of his blaster. Where could they have disappeared to? He’s stumped and it’s frustrating.  _ Humiliating. _

He’s readying to spin around, leave this hut before they ambush him again, but flinches at the sudden jabbing at the cloth lining the back of his neck, underneath it the hairs raise. Beskar chest plate feels restricting against his leaping organ and he swallows thickly, raises his hands in the air and drops the blaster. It clatters to the ground, piercing in his ears. His protection, his defence, lay between his feet.

“Smart,” the Sharpshooter sneers. It’s a woman, Mando realises, one whose voice is choking on authority. She’s confident, that’s for sure. Suppose she has the jurisdiction to be, having a sniper rifle aimed directly at  _ possibly  _ the weakest of weak spots. “Now tell me why you’re sneaking around  _ my  _ residence?”

The Mandalorian is mute—a statue.

She scoffs and fiddles around, the barrel thrusts harder into the cloth to where it finally presses against the flesh underneath. It rumbles against him, wavy vibrations tingling through his body. There’s a low, melodic hum, and it dawns on him— _ She’s charging the blast. _

“Wait! Wait,” he surrenders, his modulated voice hinting at a hidden underlayer in his tone. The vibration ceases, the humming diminishes. “I only came here after you  _ shot me _ .”

“Shot  _ at  _ you,” she emphasises.

Mando sighs. “I just want some questions answered.”

“No, I’m not for hire. No, you cannot stay here. No, you are not—”

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

The Girl pauses, contemplates, and Mando feels the barrel’s pressure weaken. His movements are quick like that of a Kaadu, and he reaches behind his helm for the rifle, shoving the length into the air to avoid accidental fire. The Sharpshooter’s movements falter a few seconds behind his but she manages a knee to the back and he stumbles forwards yanking the rifle with him, leaving her hands cold and grasping at nothing but air.

“Blast! Damn Metalhead, I would’ve let you go if you just-”

“I’m no droid,” he interrupts and bears his footing.

“Sure dress like one.” 

She’s so… vexatious. The visor meets his offender before him and he examines, pinpointing scores of interest. She’s wearing a half-face mask covering her lower expression, it’s made of durasteel and painted with a thick coat of black, imprints of a nose, mouth, and chin are on its surface though they don’t belong to her; they’re too chunky, assessing by her exposed portions her’s is much slender. It’s sinister, almost, she looks to be of another creature with that disguise.

The Mandalorian eyes her stance, protective and guarded yet ready for confrontation. In her hand, a vibro-knife hums intensely. It looks familiar, the hilt riddled with scathes and weathered paint—wait. How did she-

She lunges for him below the edging of his beskar, a foot kicking away his discarded blaster in the process. It skids across the flooring and scratches the fragile metal barrel, scratches he’d  _ just  _ managed to buff out a week prior. It’s momentum halts upon the impact of a stranded crate in the corner and he takes note of the placement before side-stepping to avoid contact with the Krayt Dragon of a woman. The hideout is too small, too narrow for him to reign successfully; the bulk of his body tumbles as she tackles him to the floor, her eyebrows stitched tightly and her eyes of a dark colour. The vibro-knife vibrates inside the palms of her hands which are pressed against the beskar, steadying herself above him. 

It’s frequencies quake against the metal and, in turn, numbs the layer of flesh underneath the armour. Two leathered appendages wrap around her bandaged ones and firmly drive upwards, disengaging the blades contact with loose material. It takes everything in him — and the Girl — not to be overpowered. 

But he’s so exhausted. Deltoids tremble underneath his persistence and he can’t stop the fatigued groans trailing through the vocoder. Sharp slices filter through his body, travelling across the muscles where they station into his biceps brutally. Mando’s mind gyrates into a twirl and it’s too much to focus on the slipping digits on the blade as it nears closer to his abdomen. 

Wide green ears, a wrinkled forehead, peachy fuzz.

The Mandalorian thrusts his torso upwards at such speed he needs to squeeze his eyes to regain vision, but he reaches high enough for the hard beskar to slam into the Girl’s forehead, and his hands slap the vibro-knife aside as she stumbles off him. They’re equal in their pace, regaining their footings and constructing an approach. 

The Girl abandons her shack—straight-up bolts outside, only, a shiny extended barrel sways across the black poncho as she gains traction against the grains. Blast! She must’ve retrieved the rifle while he was too distracted —  _ by himself.  _

Blaster and vibro-knife reclaimed, he pursuits her; doesn’t even know why he makes the effort to do so. If this is how she reacts to a question maybe he doesn’t want her answers. She hadn’t finished him off yet, this could be his opportunity to abandon ship, return to the Child, fix the Crest, and finally leave the forsaken planet. After all, she didn’t appear to  _ want  _ to kill him. If somebody were to trespass onto the Crest, Mando wouldn’t hesitate to put a beam through their eyes. 

Strange. Such a strange girl.

She’s leading him somewhere, he figures. The maneuvers are too precise and she never loses traction. When they round the corners of the canyons she exposes a glimpse of her face, calculating the empty distance between herself and the frame of beskar. The Girl’s footwork is light and dexterous. Sharp corners navigated easily, elevated boulders climbed nimbly, and respiration masterfully disciplined. She’d be able to go on for hours at this rate. The Mandalorian, on the other hand, was beginning to hear the silent popping inside his lower body; cartilage that was once cushiony in his youth is now worn away, his bones grinding together in his legs, his hips. 

Just a little more.

Digits dig into the ragged edge of a ridge and the Bounty Hunter hoists himself to the surface, deep uneven sighs expelling the oxygen in his lungs as he reviews the surroundings. It’s a high ridge, almost as high as the Girl had been on yesterday, and it overlooks the sunrise ahead of him. There’s a blur of silhouette before the emerging star, one with a rifle in its hands.

The Mandalorian is on his feet again, concealing the sway in his movements as he nears closer to the Girl. This isn’t good. Muscles twitch underneath the beskar and his hands are desensitising; he’s overexerted himself. He cringes underneath the helmet, desperate not to show a slither of weakness in his posture and body language.

And it seems to work, for the Girl disregards the trembling calves underneath him and questions, “What do you want from me?  _ I will shoot you. _ ”

Mando believes her, but he doesn’t stop approaching — doesn’t stop slinking his weight across the ridge until she fires a blast at his boots. “I already told you.”

She thinks aloud, “Why didn’t I kill you?” The Mandalorian takes another step—more of a leap—to reduce the distance some more. Recharging hums echo across the ridge and another shot flies through between his legs. “I’d stay there unless you want me to go higher.”

It’s degrading, but he complies; listens to the orders of another. If that’s what he has to do to gain an opening so be it. Doesn’t mean he can’t bemock her, edge her on and trigger a manipulated crack in her posture. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

“Didn’t kill you ‘cause I didn’t want to.”

“That’s -  _ that’s it? _ ”

No ulterior motive?

Shoulders shrug underneath the thick poncho and her grip loosens, it’s an opening but he’s patient for another. Soon enough, it will come and he’ll be hesitant no longer. “What’d you expect me to say?” she scoffs, “I looked into that visor of yours and fell for ya?”

The Mandalorian sighs, deeply. Too deeply. The lungs expand against their confines and prick against a tender muscle, earning a muted groan in response. She’s smug, on the verge of opinionated — much alike his bounty targets, yet so dissimilar. Signs of experience lined the undersides of her eyes in dense semi-circles, her eyes dusky but calm; delicate - an uncommon trait in his usual commissions. Mando finds he has to remind himself that she’s not a target, not someone he should be chasing around while other matters are on his plate right now.

“The local Ugnaught,” Mando pipes up, “what’s your intentions with him?”

“Intentions? I’m not here to cause harm if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“A trained marksman sets up station a few klicks from his farm, sneaking through gulleys with a rifle,” he eyes her, “and they’re not here to cause harm?”It’s an accusatory statement, one he doesn’t believe himself, but it’s good for a reaction. 

The thick mask obscures her expression but the furrowed brows, the heat in her eyes, portray enough emotion for the Mandalorian to understand he’d pissed her off. It surprises him how easy it was, how one little remark can stir up the grit underneath her boots. Streaks of orange warmth reflect off the metal barrel as it elevates to her eyes, the silhouette’s determined stance is an image the Mandalorian’s brain etches into memory; for why it stood out to him, he’s unsure.

Humming drags him out of his thoughts and he responds quickly, carrying the dead weight of his vambrace to shield his throat, and the other, below his breastplate. They’re the most vulnerable points of his body, areas that can cause substantial damage, his additional flaws can be tended to with less difficulty. 

Sweltering laser of red impacts his beskar with a  _ clink  _ and ricochets into the sky.

She had aimed for his abdomen. Not a fatal wound, but one that’d cause trouble. 

Upon realising her shot hadn’t penetrated the armour she makes another attempt, changing her stance to take on a stronger recoil; shoulders flexed and her core knotted tightly to compensate for the lack of muscles needed for such a sizeable rifle. It hums to life once again, the noise shrieking through the air. 

The Mandalorian makes his move — confident on his armours durability — and charges towards her, vambraces intact against his clothed flesh. Calves are burning and his feet blistering, but he endures the aching. Welcomes it.

_ Clink!  _ A laser soars into the sky to join its duplicate.

She hesitates and the rifle drops in her arms, the tip of the barrel scratching against the firm ground; defeated. When he’s finally at arm's-length he wastes no time in tackling her, rough beskar pushing against her form until she lays beneath his weight. “Drop it,” he orders, one of his leathered hands wrapping around the lower receiver of the rifle. Bandaged fingers twine around the trigger unit stubbornly. One of his knees press into her abdomen and she reluctantly caves in with a groan of agony, loosening her grip on the sniper's handle.

It’s yanked from her reach and thrown ahead of them, beyond the ridge’s edge and down the bottomless pit below. “You — you son of a— I’ll gut you like a ghest, you-” she stammers her words and Mando digs into her stomach some more, subtly warning her. “That —  _ fuck,  _ that cost me a  _ life’s worth of credits! _ ”

He tilts his head at her, ponders for a moment, and frisks her for weapons but she’s devoid of anything but the clothes on her back. “Couldn’t trust you to not shoot me.” 

“Wise.” she hisses.

“Get up,” he demands, removing his weight. “I have more questions for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dins-creed on tumblr! 
> 
> This chapter absolutely ruined my google doc at the end; thing stopped responding like six times.


	3. Slither

Serrated blades slice through the Mandalorian’s skin, drawing out droplets of crimson between shredded strands of black material. It’s got the heat of a thousand suns, the muscles underneath beskar flaming to the touch. Not to mention the needles drilling inside the matter of his brain and against the backs of his eyes.

While the pain wasn’t physical, it felt too genuine; a phantom touch of liquid seeping out of the imaginary wounds. Nonetheless, the throbbing against his brain was real; something he’d accumulated as a consequence of the Sharpshooter—the Girl he’d wasted valuable strength on chasing only for it to return as counterproductive. 

She’s an exceptional markswoman; one of the best Mando’s ever encountered in fact.

Strangely enough, though, she truly had no intentions of causing harm to the Ugnaught nor did she have the desire to exterminate the Mandalorian and capture the Child for her own payout. She didn’t seem to want anything, really—except compensation for her destroyed sniper rifle. 

Compensation that he did not possess. With the guild on his back, it’s impossible to seize a job opportunity. He’s lucky if he had a single credit to his name.

_ “How about that rifle you got there? It’d look delightful in my arms, much better than your back.”  _

The Mandalorian rejects her proposal without reluctance. He’s not the bartering type, especially not so when it comes to his weapons—his identity.

Metallic whines resonate through the air, old wind turbines creaking against wisps of the breeze. Deep and breathy reptilian groans accompany the screeches, the blurrgs acknowledging his return. It almost feels welcoming, if not for the determined sharpshooter in tow. “Hey,” she calls out, “slow down!”

Mando sighs and rolls his eyes underneath the helmet. The Girl hadn’t abandoned her quest of pursuing the bounty hunter all the way back to Kuiil’s; he’s beginning to go stir-crazy having a constant reminder prodding his back. 

“Mandalorian, what’s the rush? We both know you can’t outrun me — I already proved that.” she boasts. “Besides, I ain’t leaving your side until you give me enough credits to reimburse me.”

“I don’t have credits for you.”

The Girl reaches his side and syncs her footwork with his, he struggles not to tilt his helmet down and observe. It’s perfectly aligned, as though they were fused as one; boots falter, digging into the grit. He stands stationary and she soon mimics his action, standing a metre away with her eyes locked on him. 

“That’s fine, I don’t need credits.”

“Great-”

She extends her hand, the bandages layered with dirt. “I’ll take that rifle.”

Such a pain in the ass. “You’re not having the rifle.”

Shoulders shrug and her exposed palm returns to her hip, “Credits it is, then.”

Mando leers at her. The half-face mask remained planted firmly against her skin yet he can see the outlines of an overly smug grin, it stirs something within him. Anger? Irritation? A dire to shut her up? Yes to all. The vocoder modulates a breathy exhale and he continues his advances towards Kuiil’s hut, the sun striking the dome structure with violence. 

Coarse turf crunches underneath the Girl’s hasty boots behind him, her presence lingering traces surrounding the bounty hunter.

The Child’s coos can be heard from a distance, and as he nears closer they only increase in quantity and rowdiness. Mando meets him halfway and crouches to collect the incoming ball of green, consoling him into the crevices between beskar where flesh laid beneath the underclothing. Warbles subside, muffled into the fabric, and Mando continues inside the hut to greet Kuiil.

The Girl’s sudden lack of presence doesn’t go unnoticed by the Mandalorian; must be waiting outside. He doesn’t question it, just relishes in the quiet. Kuiil sits on a small stool ahead of a propped-up table littered with cups of freshly brewed tea,  _ three  _ in fact.

“Did you expect company?” Mando questions, observing the active steam billowing upwards.

Kuiil deflects his questioning, “Retrieve the one you decided to instigate.”

Mando protests, “I didn’t inst-”

“I have spoken.”

The Mandalorian sighs heavily and with slumped shoulders he passes through the narrow doorway and retreats outside. There’s an immediate difference in temperature, despite the armour and lack of cooling technology inside Kuiil’s shack; Mando isn’t one for desert planets — yet frequenting them so often — they’re too scalding and the air is stale through his filters. In addition to the stray particles that roam his ship after many sunsets from his voyage, gritstone ransacked his layers upon layers of physical barriers clinging to his body; it often required him to designate an entire day worth of sunlight to eradicate the molecules. 

He just hopes the Razor Crest can be repaired; soon.

The Girl stands before the blurrg pen, her hands fixed behind her back and her poncho hood concealing her face once again. Mando hesitates with the Child in his arms, visor tilting downwards to meet a wrinkled forehead pressed into his shirt; must’ve been wide awake all night causing trouble for his babysitter.

“Kuiil would like to meet you,” Mando says after a moment and decreases the gap with three long strides. 

She shifts on her feet, sways a little before returning stiff. “No.”

“No? Why not?”

“I’m just here for my-”

“Rifle, yeah, I heard.”

She laughs, somewhat amused at the Mandalorian’s grumbling. The thick black of her poncho adjusts and twists on her axis, a slither of unseen expression striking his pupils. The solid outlines of the false face replaced with rounded flesh and delicate sketches of alluring features. She doesn’t completely turn, doesn’t expose herself entirely underneath the Mandalorian’s gaze; a side profile is all he receives yet he finds himself captured over the display, his heavy eyes sculpting it into his consciousness. 

Mando clears his throat, the muscles sore with dryness. Since when was he the type to admire one’s appearance? A potential threat’s, nonetheless. Well...except for a few flings scattered throughout his years, of course. He was just a regular man after all; one, it seems, who struggles to conceal his impression of beautiful girls. This feeling, though, is different from those situations; opposite almost. New and untouched. 

Fortunately, her behaviour doesn’t suggest her notice in his difference of character and he steals a moment to compose himself. “Best not to keep him waiting long.”

She parts her lips — Mando’s gaze lowers to the Child — and expires a thin floaty sigh, not of frustration but more so tentativeness. She snickers, “Getting a lecture, aren’t I?”

“It’s a high possibility.”

“Yeah,” she mutters. The sleek of her jaw disappears, the back of her poncho welcoming Mando’s visor once again. Tattered bandages extend to a post of the blurrg’s enclosure and seize the blocky disguise, reassigning its position on her face. “Let’s head on in then, shall we?”

Mando’s helmet trails her as she passes. “No, you should talk to him alone. This is his land. You owe an explanation; tell your story.”

Her eyes shift to the Child napping in the crook of his arm, lingering for a moment  _ too long. _ “And what of you,” she gestures, “and him?”

“I’m sure I’ll discover what I need to know soon enough.”

It’s not a threat nor a lighthearted joke; a promise.

She laughs anyway, suppressed by the face-covering, “Right, we’ll see about that.”

“Go inside.”

“Better not ditch me here, Mando. I  _ will  _ get that rifle.” she sneers, “I guess you ain’t got nowhere to go anyways, huh?”

Mando ponders, questions himself, wonders why he doesn’t reply with some half-witted jab. Alternatively, he savours the silence between them, her presence too close — or not close enough — to himself. His mouth opens to confirm he has no mode of departing but she speaks first, her covered hands twiddling together before her lap, “I wouldn’t go snooping if I were you. Whatever you may find… I can ascertain you won’t like it.”

What does  _ that  _ mean? And why is she behaving so…  _ coy _ ? 

The Markswoman disappears behind the measly flap of the door but his eyes stare past the visor and through the tapestry, outlining two circulating physiques. There’s an ounce of him that wishes to eavesdrop on the conversation, gain intelligence on the stranger in case she turns out to be more than he can handle; a substantial likelihood of somebody with her talents. He resists the urge and instead endures the overwhelming sensations of trepidation. 

_ You need to learn to trust, Mando, not everybody’s out to get ya or your kid,  _ Peli Motto had told him the last he saw her. It’s peculiar how her words often come to him in these situations - perhaps she’s much wiser than he gives credit for.  _ Can’t hurt to show a little faith.  _

Mando was raised learning differently, but situations have been changed—rearranged entirely. He’s Mandalorian; surviving by the means of a code he swore to as a boy. A bounty hunter; additional regulations he’d subjected his existence to. 

_ In the Hunt, One Captures or Kills, Never Both. _

The Child’s unconscious coos of contentment are a reminder of the rules he’d disregarded so effortlessly. The Mandalorian sighs. It’s a nuisance being alone with his thoughts; comparable to a plague, for once it begins it’s far too challenging to cure himself of the cloudy outbreak.

Aravala-7’s sun descends behind the towering ridges in the distance and the taunting flecked sky commences its return overhead. Behind him, a slither of luminous silver-white is perched among the emptiness. Its shine virtually succumbed by the shadows or lack thereof—space is a large void of nothingness from the perspective of a planet so minuscule. 

Silver gleams softly, dull. It’s less threatening than the crescents deficiency from the night prior, yet it stirs something in him; a perplexing impression in the bottomless quarry of his soul—his Honour.

Mando peers backwards at the den; soft skin and daring eyes clouding his judgement. 

He needs to repair the Crest and depart Aravala-7—urgently.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and feedback help me improve my writing and motivation, please consider taking a moment to voice your thoughts on the chapter!


	4. Razor Crest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the Razor Crest inoperable, the Mandalorian seeks the assistance of the Girl to administer repairs to the vessel. Only, he can't seem to get unprofessional thoughts regarding her out of his head, and she proves to be more mysterious than she looks.

The Girl — whose name the Mandalorian  _ still  _ didn’t know — had kept her distance since leaving Kuiil’s hut and he can’t help but wonder why. She’d been adamant about sticking to his side earlier, but now, standing in front of the dome structure, he could hardly see the speck of black in the distance. She wasn’t planning on leaving, this the Mandalorian knew. Perhaps she was keeping her distance, but she’s headstrong in regards to her desires of his rifle.

“What did you say to her?” Mando questions the Ugnaught, his arms crossed and leaning against the arched stone. The Child waddles ahead of them, plucking pebbles off the ground and collecting rock dust in his cloth.

Kuiil hums a moment, scratches his jowls before answering, “She’s isolated herself. Hardly said a word.”

“She was chewing my ear off the way here,” Mando grumbles, “Wants compensation for her destroyed rifle.”

“Seems reasonable.”

_ Of course, he’d take her side. _ Mando shakes his head and elevates himself. “Did you manage to examine the Crest?”

The Ugnaught shifts in his seat, a tight-lipped frown extending his face. “It’s not good. It will take time to repair.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Then you have to make some,” he argues. “Or -- ask  _ her _ .”

“The Girl?” Mando scrunches his brows underneath the helm, “Is she experienced in mechanics?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Of all the planets to emergency land, why did it have to be Arvala-7? Tatooine would’ve been perfect, Peli Motto could mend the spacecraft while Mando went off to hunt a bounty in the meantime — and he wouldn’t have a markswoman burning holes into his beskar whenever she glanced in his direction — which is precisely  _ why  _ it wasn’t Tatooine. It’s just too ideal to work in his favour.

Mando’s visor enlarges before his eyes and the figure of a motionless poncho-clad woman focuses in vision. If he’s to deal with her for the remainder of his time here, it would be on his terms. Under  _ his  _ supervision. Somewhere she can’t get an advantage on him. “So, the Girl then.” The vocoder battles to detect his hushed tone and comes up defeated, his words not managing to reach the Ugnaught’s knowledge. “I’ll head to the Crest before sunrise. Defend it against the Jawa’s.”

Kuiil hums in agreement and returns to his shack for a night's rest. 

The Mandalorian retrieves the Child, who puts up a fuss in his arms upon being separated from his little collection of rocks, and the two head towards the Girl. Mando’s breathing is calm and controlled to the ways he’d constructed it over his youth, but as he nears the character it wavers, stumbles over his very throat. Her bare presence is suffocating, he chokes on the flourishes she exudes. He soldiers on, “Do you know much about mechanics?”

“Depends. If you’re talking ‘bout that ship of yours, well it looked pretty beat up last I saw. Probably gone by now with Jawas lurking.”

“I have methods of retrieval if that’s the case. For now, you’re coming with me.”

“That goes without saying,” she turns, her hood swaying in tune with the passing wind. “I already told you I ain’t leaving your side, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

She seems pleased, nodding her head. “Of course I did. Let’s go then. Sooner I fix that hunk of junk of yours, the sooner I get my credits.” Her eyes jab at his visor, “Ain’t that right, Mando?”

He doesn’t answer, just guides her to the Crests stationary location and hopes it’s still there.

It is — still there, despite being overrun by Gorvin snu’s. Trails of wind waft through the engine’s propellers and they whine at the faint touch, the durasteel creaking in on itself. The irreplaceable spacecraft sits there desecrated, wailing in agony. The Girl stands before the entrance, arms crossed and waiting for the Mandalorian to extend the hatch. “Come on then, let me give her a look.”

Mando fingers his vambrace and the ramp descends with a hiss of air expelling from inside. Scaly skin of orange scatter from the Crest, startled from the unexpected movements, and scamper along the grit in a rush. The Girl steps foot inside and pauses to take in the surroundings, eyeing the littered crates and vast emptiness of the hold. In the distance, the carbonite pods catch her attention. Eyes linger, hesitating. She only continues her observation further inside when Mando enters behind her and places the Child down softly, allowing him room to explore the confines. “Cockpit is upstairs,” Mando gestures to the ladder.

She nods faintly, her feet heavy as she trudges to the ladder and climbs. Mando doesn’t follow her, not right away. He takes a moment to recollect his bearings, breathe in the old recycled air through his filters. It’s the closest he can taste of home. The weapons unit opens with a click of his vambrace, exposing his small and ever-so-slowly growing arsenal. The Amban rifle returns to its setting, propped up on the highest hook displayed over the handheld blasters; it’s better not to be carrying the one thing she wants, at least not right now. Besides, with no weapons of her own, it’d be like taking clams from a Gungan to take her down with just his blaster — or the vibro-knife for that matter.

The Child preoccupies himself slobbering over a stray protein cube that Mando must’ve dropped the other day. There’s no attempt on his behalf to rob the hungry little imp of his precious grub, it’d do no good. Once those stubby claws latch onto something, it was as good as gone or his favourite new toy. An attempt to separate him from either would result in a very restless, inconsolable baby. The cube slips through his lips and slides down his throat with a large gulp, his large ears turning to his guardian in glory, a satisfied smile upon his face.

With a shake of his head, Mando shuts the hatch of the Crest ensuring his unpredictable crewmate doesn’t leave yet again. The Girl had been alone long enough. Tan leather wraps around the silver metal rung and he boosts himself upwards with two steps, regaining his footing at the top. The markswoman sits in his piloting chair, protected flesh of her arms moving to and fro rapidly clicking buttons and pulling levers. The Mandalorian stands in the passage with an armoured shoulder resting against the frame. 

“You got a droid?” she asks, her head never turning to acknowledge his presence.

“No.” A bandaged finger touches the astromech interface socket and she taps it twice, implying her next question regarding the connector. “It was there when I got it. I don’t use droids.”

She sighs and the chair takes on her weight as she leans back, hands playing with the arms beside her. “It’s going to be a lot harder without a droid’s diagnostics.”

“Is it repairable?”

“Well -- yeah,” she scoffs. “It’ll take a few hours.”

“Hours?”

“Should’ve only taken one or two, but-”

Mando interrupts, “Kuiil inferred it’d take much longer.”

The chair swivels, creaking. The Girl props a leg over the other and gazes at the visor before her, but the Mandalorian doesn’t make eye contact. Brown irises concentrate on the uncovered skin of her lower face, her lips shiny with a sheen of her saliva and her nose the perfect detailing to conclude the image he’d been deprived of. It’s barbaric—how she wears a mask and has the audacity to conceal  _ this.  _ Perhaps it's the lighting of the Crest, the blinking lights above their heads, but her eyes appear to spark in pulses. Yeah, it had to be the Crest —  _ the Crest that she’s operating _ . His Crest. Under her control.

The Mandalorian is eternally grateful for his own mask, concealing the heat in his cheeks, and the bulk of his pants to—

“Oi, Mando!” she snaps her fingers dramatically, “Sleeping under that thing or something?”

He clears his throat and clasps his hands together ahead of his lap, mimicking her positioning earlier but for vastly different reasons. “What?”

“I said,” she groans, “do you have a welding torch?”

“I-uh, no.”

“We’re not going anywhere without one. The engine is barely hanging on.”

Mando sighs with irritation, “Kuiil will be here in the morning with tools to assist.”

The Girl chews on her bottom lip in thought and swivels back towards the control panel, flipping a switch to power it down. “There’s not much I can do until then. For now, I can focus on your hyperdrive operations — hopefully, increase the probability to something greater than 43.4%. I mean, how have you managed this far with these odds against you?”

The Mandalorian shifts underneath the hefty weight of beskar, suddenly uncomfortable from the restricting plates. It’s almost as though he was a boy once again, gawking underneath his visor at the passing girls of the villages he’d visit. Their dresses flowing in the wind and provoking a reaction from deep within his stomach; lower. The Girl is the opposite, yet somehow identical. She stimulates a reaction of pathetic male physiological response he fought so desperately to repress all these years, but the palpitations within his heart are new. Foreign. 

Paradoxical, almost.

“What’s your name?”

The Girl labours a chuckle, “Want my backstory now, do you?”

“Just a name will be sufficient,” Mando retorts. “Presently.”

The leather of the chair whines as her weight is removed. The poncho hangs loosely from her shoulders and lands a few inches below her thighs, masking the figure underneath.  _ It enrages him,  _ and he doesn’t understand why. 

She hums in thought, rocking on the heels of her feet. Her lips part, tongue darting out to paste another coat of saliva upon her lips, and she sucks in a breath before sharply exhaling it into an empty sigh of her name that floats through the air, phasing through the beskar of his helmet and infiltrating his eardrums. It’s refreshing like the krill ponds of Sorgan with the heat of Arvala-7’s very sun. Mando whispers the name under his breath, the vocoder incapable of detecting the breathy words.

“There you go. Okay? Okay. I’m - I’m gonna go take a look at the hull’s inventory, perhaps you’ve got-”

The Mandalorian captures her elbow as she attempts to pass, interrupting her momentum in the middle of the doorway awkwardly. “What about these?” He strokes a leather thumb across the bandages and takes notice of the timid flinch underneath his touch.

“No,” she shakes her head. “No, you’re not getting any more out of me. What about you, huh? What’s  _ your  _ name?””

It’s the first time she’d voiced her interest regarding his identity, yet he’s uncertain whether it’s genuine interest or another attempt to elicit a reaction out of him. He presumes it's the latter in regards to the conversation, but he expects it to be the former.

“There’s bacta gel in the inventory,” he releases his grip and steps inside the cockpit, “if you’re in pain.”

She doesn’t respond and resumes her pacing to the hold, leaving Mando alone yet again. He wasn’t complaining. He embraces isolation—depends on it. Nonetheless, having an additional occupant aboard was refreshing. Not optimal, in regards to his current bounty situation. Be that as it may, the Girl’s company was accepted.

The Mandalorian didn’t hate people, after all. He just had a knack for discovering the shady characters.

Mando plants himself in the pilot’s chair, still warm from the Girl’s body heat. It can be felt even through the layer of thick fabric and he sinks  _ lower,  _ sighing as he stares out the viewport into the vast open desert. It’s hot even with the sun no longer present. He’d been on Arvala-7 far too long and it’s only a matter of time before the guild catches up, but the Girl appeared to be confident in her mechanics and if all went well he’ll be off the planet by noon. He could survive a couple more hours.

The arousal in his pants is more detectable now that he’s sitting and Mando faces a mental fight in an attempt to rid himself of the predicament. His hand itches to dig deep beneath his trousers and find a quick release but he resists against the thoughts. He was a boy no longer, he’s more than capable of ignoring it until it resolves itself. 

“ _ Di’kut, _ ” Mando hisses to himself, the leathers digging into the arms of the chair. 

He demands a distraction, his thoughts clouded with the soft pinks of a muscular organ and the shiny sheen it leaves in its trail — a scream shatters through the Crest’s hold, one belonging to the Child. Not a coo, not a high-pitched squeal of laughter.  _ A scream.  _

The Mandalorian wastes no time bounding across the cockpit and sliding down the ladder. He knew he shouldn’t have left the Girl alone with the Child, knew it was only a matter of time before she attempted to seize him for herself and with Mando now owing her money, it’s a sharp move on her part. The Client could fill her pockets with enough credits to last a lifetime. 

“Get away from-” Mando freezes with his hand hovering over his blaster, his eyes surveying the scene laid before him. The Girl off in the far end of the hold investigating inventory stock, just as confused as himself, and the Child sat among one of the crates in a grump. Little claws are balled into a makeshift fist flailing around helplessly. “What happened? Why is he upset?”

“I don’t - I don’t know,” her eyes shift between the tower of beskar and the ball of green, “he was babbling about something, when I turned around he - he just...screamed.”

The Mandalorian shifts closer to the kid, monitoring his demeanour. As he nears closer, the shine of the little silver knob of his control throttle glimpses between green stumps. “Hey, kid,” he crouches in front of the child and exposes a palm for the sphere, “you wanna play?”

The Child coos and burbles into the ball, his batwing ears twisting to look at the Girl behind him. Mando tracks his eyes, his own narrowing in contemplation. Eventually, he caves into his curiosity. “Come here.”

“What — me?”

“Yes. Come here.”

“I’m - uh, not good with kids.” she deflects, hands raised in the air defensively. She even takes a step backwards, seeking to gain distance between herself and them. Anybody would think the Child was a feral tooka-cat judging by her expressions.

Mando’s head tilts. “He’s interested in you, and if you don’t give him what he wants he’ll only get louder.”

She shakes her head, “I really don’t know how to-” The Child erupts into a loud bellow, again. Louder, longer. It’s piercing. Worthy of glass shattering. “Okay! Kriff.”

He dies down to a blubber, fake tears prodding at the corners of his eyes. The Girl joins the pair and awkwardly stands before the Child, awaiting further instructions from the Mandalorian. “Put your hand out,” he advises. She does as told and the Child drops the orb into her palm, slick with his slobber which catches onto her bandages and seeps into the fabrics. 

“Ugh,” she grimaces, displeased, “okay, now?”

Mando sweeps the Child off the crate and places him on the floor, where he finds comfort against the container with his legs spread out ahead of him. “Roll it to him.”

The Girl lowers to her knees a little ways ahead of the Child and places the control knob on the hold’s flooring with a  _ tink.  _ She sighs, “Okay…” Wrapped fingers flick the ball gently, providing enough momentum for it to drive into the Child’s awaiting hands and leaving a trail of drool in its wake. 

He squeals with delight, a bright smile engulfing half of his little face. The Mandalorian smiles softly underneath his protector. The Child thrusts the sphere back to the Girl, spinning on its axis as it trails across the flooring. It slows between her open palms and she shuffles the ball out of his field of view, switching it between the two hands until she’s satisfied with the look of disarray on his face. “Alright,” she extends her closed fists to the Child, “which one?”

The Child isn’t shy about his answer and immediately reaches for her right hand, eager. The Girl laughs softly and unwinds her fingers from the knob. It shines underneath the Crest’s lights. “He’s a clever one,” she praises, returning his plaything to his stubby little fingers where it belongs. 

“Yes.” The Mandalorian agrees. 

If only she knew of the true extent of his capabilities.

“Is it safe for me to leave now?”

He chuckles, “He seems pleased, I’d say so.”

“Great,” she sighs and hoists herself to her feet, though she doesn’t return to rummaging through the inventory. Mando looks up at her with a tilted head. “Where - where’s the bacta?”

“Third container.”

The Mandalorian peruses her as she shimmies through the mass of crates and stumbles upon one marked ‘3’. The visor stays targeted on her, even when she raises her gaze back to him before quickly returning it to the stock. It’s only when she grasps the pack of healing gel and repositions her back towards him that he tears his eyes away, giving her what little privacy she’ll find on the Crest, despite every bone in his body telling him to look. She was secretive, a trait he was all too familiar with, and wherever there’s a secret there’s a respectable reason to be suspicious. 

It was up to him to discover what it was — for the kid’s protection. He was confident, in due time, she would unfold before him like everybody else did. 

She’ll just take a little bit longer than most.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Di'kut - fool, idiot


	5. Commission

The Mandalorian sits in his piloting chair with gloved fingers trailing amongst the navigation controls. There’s little to no pressure applied in his efforts and yet it manages to pick up the faintest trace of his digits. The monitor illuminates before him to display the planet the Crest was situated on; a small little rundown rock in the Outer Rim he’d never batted an eye at before, until he accepted a commission from a neighbouring planet. 

Outside, the engines drag to a stop, the screeching of propellers replaced with a passive hiss of expelled air. It’s astounding how favourably the Girl had serviced the spacecraft, especially all on her own; she had specified her proficiency regarding mechanical work and rejected assistance from him or even Kuiil. Mando had his doubts, and having a stranger tinker with his craft didn’t sit right with him, but she evidently came through.

The performance of the thrusters had considerably enhanced and there’s no longer a drag when he’s departing the atmosphere, it’s swift and smooth like it had been all those years ago long before he pushed it to its limits — on multiple occasions. With a flick of a switch, the twin engines roar to life like never before. It’s a sound that echoes throughout the land; his own melody. The Girl offered to oil the levers of his control panel to stop them from catching against the rust but he rejected, knowing all too well the Child’s inquisitiveness would trigger  _ another  _ crash landing. If he’s to deal with stubborn levers to avoid that, he’d happily do so. 

The Girl also increased the hyperdrives probability as she mentioned; from a measly 43.4% to an advanced 79.8%.  _ It’s the best you’ll get from a craft this old,  _ she boasted to him,  _ If you ever decide to replace it I’ll be sure to show you the true potential of a spacecraft.  _ She reminded him of Peli Motto when she talked about his Crest, both women having insulted his property — numerously. 

The two of them would get along swell.

Her face mask sits among the navigation controls where she departed from it upon tuning the wiring underneath the controls. It stares at him condescendingly. Mando retrieves the covering in a loose grip and twists it observing the smooth walls on the inside, he flips it over again and runs a leathered finger across the jagged scratches along the cheeks and jaw feeling the ridges dip with each slash. It’s been through a beating.  _ She’s been through a beating. _

The finger travels from the cheek to the sharpened bulk of the mouth tracings, where the tip massages side-to-side between the seals. It’s too broad and unsavoury to represent her mouth but, despite that, he’s ignited with hues of pinks and reds. An uncomfortable heat travels through his neck and shoulders, settling across his chest. It’s hot underneath the helmet and if not for his filters working overtime, he’d be struggling for a breath right about now. 

He’s so simple-minded concerning the Girl.

The Mandalorian shifts in his seat, attentive to the lack of noise. He sighs.

Even his chair had been tended to in her downtime, the years-old squeak and creak of leather on metal suddenly replaced with lifeless muteness. There was no screw left untightened within the Crest’s hull. Mando is reluctant to pry into his impressions of the Girl. This was  _ his  _ Crest, one of the most valuable elements in his life, and having another being parading around its hold  _ touching everything  _ is distressing. Admittedly, she’s unbelievably instrumental and he would still be on Arvala-7 if it weren’t for her services.

“So, are you coming or what?”

Services that weren’t free. 

With the memory of a destroyed rifle placed upon his shoulders — and now a service fee, it seems — she’d taken it upon herself to declare she’ll be joining him from now on, at least until he can afford to reimburse her. 

“You’re staying here,” Mando replies and lifts himself from the leather, leaving her mask in his position. He expects a squeak but it never comes. It’s something he’s going to struggle to grow accustomed to. 

“With the kid? Absolutely not.”

“He’s coming with me.”

She laughs, “Don’t trust me with him?”

Mando tilts his head at her, eyeing her up and down through the visor. “You’ve said it yourself, you’re not good with kids.”

The Girl crosses her arms and follows him into the hold, leaning her back against the Crest’s wall as she observes his movements. “So you’re telling me you do trust me?”

“I never said that.” The Mandalorian thumbs his vambrace and the weapons unit doors open to reveal his stash. The Amban phase-pulse rifle sits at the top with honour, the dull inside lights reflecting off the metal barrel. 

“Ah,  _ my rifle _ .” She quips and reaches out to touch the rifle, but his rough leather clasps her wrist before it nears. It’s not a strong grip — not even one of a warning — just enough to stop her movements. “Oh, come on! You’re gonna need someone watching your back out there.”

“No.” He pushes her arm away and retrieves the rifle. It nestles against his back comfortably and he turns to his sleeping berth to collect the Child, who was the only one who managed to get a wink of sleep with all the turbulence.

“So let me get this right,” the Girl clears her throat and Mando stops in his tracks, turning to her with crossed arms and an impatient frown upon his face. Though the Girl cannot see the last-mentioned, the preceding does justice in displaying his thoughts regarding her intrusiveness. “You’re going to let me — the person you’re so reluctant to trust — stay behind on the Razor Crest with the qualifications of a pilot? I don’t know about you but I’d call that trust, Mando, or that bucket of yours has obstructed your brain development.” 

“You won’t leave without your credits.”

“And what of the Crest? She’s not in the  _ greatest  _ shape, but she’ll sell for a decent price.”

“ _ Shabuir, _ ” Mando cusses and sighs deeply.

The Girl ignores his insult, not as though she would understand him anyways, and continues pressing, “Seems like you got a decision to make.” 

Mando seethes underneath his flight suit, his chest burning with something far different than before. He’d dealt with numerous bounties in his lifetime, most of which were more snide than her and yet, she always finds a way to dig underneath all that beskar to and prod his insides just enough to expel a reaction. He stares through the visor, his eyes digging into her own; she stands undeterred. She just never quits, never stops being so contentious. Not even to breathe. 

The helmet flicks over to the far end of the Crest and his eyes narrow at the carbonite pods hidden away; it’d be so effortless to freeze her within one of them and subject her to a perpetual slumber. The Crest would finally find some tranquillity during the long journeys and he wouldn’t have the continuous reminder of owed credits flaunting throughout his spacecraft.

“Okay,” he groans. Despite the inclination to hear the hiss of carbonite, he caves in. She wasn’t a bounty nor threatening him — yet. The snark he’s victimised to isn’t worth squandering a carbonite pod. “We do this on my terms. Stick close to me, otherwise, you’ll get in the way of my line of fire.”

The Girl is triumphant, a large smile plastered on her face upon her victory. “I’ll need a blaster.”

“No.” The Mandalorian closes the weapons unit with a press of his vambrace. “My terms.”

The commission is simple and they should be in and out without complications — of course, this was never the case. There’s always some unfortunate aspect laced within the commission that he had been failed to be informed of or, in this case, a group of corrupt thieves attempting to claim what’s not theirs; an artefact that, by all standards, appeared to render useless.

It’s a silver sphere, not too unlike that of the Crest’s control throttle, but roughly the size of his palm. It has indentations surrounding it and appeared to have minuscule hinges, but he hadn’t figured out how to open it. He genuinely didn’t care for it — he only requires it for the reward. It’s worth doesn’t matter. It slips into a compartment within his belt and he twists his body to face the opposite side of the rock he’d shielded himself behind. Blaster fire hadn’t ceased for a solid two minutes and at this rate, he wasn’t getting out of here anytime soon. He’d been separated from the Child and the Girl, with them being a few rocks distance behind himself. They were safer than he was, but he still can’t stop thinking of the Child’s security.

It wasn’t often they were seperated by gunfire like this.

Beskar turns to peer behind him and he locks onto the Girl, the lower half of her face covered with her ridiculous mask. She gestures with her hands, her voice useless underneath all the firing. One of her hands extends ahead of her and cups an imaginary tube, while the other pulls back towards her cheek and her forefinger draws like a trigger.

The Mandalorian shakes his head at her request.

The Girl’s eyebrows knit together in frustration and her gestures fill with aggression. In front of her, the Child’s ears perk up at the sight of his guardian and he waddles towards him, unperturbed by the beams darting past their shelter.

“No!” he yells, but the Child doesn’t hear.

The Mandalorian sees green and red — in that order; static pale green laying in a lump among the dirt with violent kinetic red pooling around it, engulfing the brightness with a sticky dark liquid. It’s seeping into the brown cloth, staining the robes. It’s suffocating him. The Child — the Mandalorian’s dependent — lays in a lifeless clump, the blood on his little body attracting the dirt underneath him like a magnet, the grit clinging to his cheeks harshly. His robes billow smoke from an impact wound of blaster fire.

Mando struggles to suck in a breath with eyes latched onto the fading green. His stomach lurches, his forehead lined with a coating of sweat.  _ His foundling.  _ There’s a rise in his throat and he battles to keep the contents down. Helmets and stomach acid aren’t harmonious. Nonetheless, the sour taste in his mouth doesn’t swallow with it; a reminder of what was.

_ I’m so sorry, kid. _

Bandaged fingers cling to the Child’s robes and capture him within covered arms, pressing the cooing baby against a warm body with one forearm. He looks up at his saviour with a frown and outstretched his arms for The Mandalorian. The Girl’s distressed, her face contorted with uncomfortableness, panic, with a blemish of relief for the kid’s safety. The Mandalorian’s head is tilted to face his lap and her attempts to get his attention go undetected. She collects a group of pebbles with her free hand, crunching them in her bindings before heaving the contents at the figure of beskar. The cobbles clink against the steel and she’s met with a dusky visor and she stalls, stares at him as though the viewfinder could portray emotions; because it definitely resembled anguish — she wasn’t imagining that.

Mando’s eyes bounce to and fro, observing the lack of red on the Child and the ground. His eyes narrow in confusion but he welcomes it; doesn’t care how he’s unscathed, just grateful he was. The vocoder emits a heavy sigh and he throws his helmet against the rock behind him, listening to the clank reverberate through the beskar. He allows himself a moment to recuperate, listening to the thumping in his ears return to a normal pace.

He can’t sit around and wait much longer. It’s only a matter of time before the thieves flank their positions. 

The Mandalorian plucks his sidearm blaster out of his holster and skims it along the ground, kicking up dust as it makes a beeline for the Girl. She eyes the weapon cautiously before picking it up with her free hand, bouncing it in her hands to feel the weight. It’s one of his lighter blasters, but she seems satisfied with it. 

With the rifle in his hands and the blaster in hers, they make their stand against the faction. Mando manipulates the rifle with ease, each squeeze of the trigger disintegrating a foe before him. It leaves nothing but their weapons behind and he takes relief in watching it tumble to the ground where they stood. 

He’s taken out at least seven bandits and, judging by the lifeless bodies scattered amongst the dust, the Girl was nearing his score. The sole remainder of the crew stands among the bodies of his comrades, blaster loosely hanging from his fingertips as he glances around in sorrow. Mando aligns the sights with his head, leather squeaking against his fingers as he goes to squeeze. 

It drops dead, a burning hole between his eyes. 

“My bad,” the Girl calls out from behind her refuge, “did I steal your thunder?”

The Mandalorian returns his rifle to its resting place and trudges towards them, ignoring the snarky remarks the Girl has to offer. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” she holds out the Child, but he has other plans in mind and nestles back into the crook of her arm, “no, no, no. Go to your father.”

_ Father.  _ Mando rolls his eyes under his visor. “Doesn’t seem like he  _ wants  _ to.”

She gulps audibly and gingerly cradles the Child against her warmth, visibly uncomfortable. “Mando, I can’t-”

“He’s not going to bite you,” Mando interrupts, “unless he’s hungry.”

“No, you don’t get it. I can’t - I don’t want to h…”

Mando observes, head tilted. The Girl’s pale, almost ill-looking. He’d never seen someone’s colour drain so quickly, by the hands of a kid no less. He urges, “Why are you so scared of him?””

“I’m not scared of him!”

“You look petrified.”

“I’m not - it’s just...ugh! You —  _ you’re… _ ” she stumbles over her words and a frantic arm sways in the air beside her, gesturing back and forth to the Mandalorian. “ _ E chu ta! _ ” she curses and surrenders the Child — who whines at the disturbance but hastily calms upon feeling beskar — in his arms. She doesn’t utter another word, doesn’t have a snide remark left; abandoning the Mandalorian and the Child alone for a moment before they follow from a distance, keen on relinquishing the burden of the stolen artefact to the clientele.

The Girl leads the way back to the Crest at a radius, giving the Mandalorian some much-needed space and opportunity to consider her. This was the second time she’d acted in such a way towards the Child. Sure, he’s an odd little creature with special abilities Mando couldn’t begin to grasp, but he’d never imagined someone being apprehensive of him. He’s just a kid, after all — she had no knowledge of his abilities.

The Mandalorian observes her erratic movements as she boards the Crest, immediately seeking refuge in the cockpit. Unluckily for her, there wasn’t a single region of the ship she’d find serenity from him and his curiosity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Shabuir" - extreme insult "jerk", but much stronger
> 
> I had to split this chapter into two since it was at 5.2k words so be on the lookout for its partner real soon! Also...these chapter titles will be the death of me. I have no idea what I'm doing.


	6. Mesh'la

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mando and the Girl get into an altercation as he searches for answers regarding her strange behaviour regarding the Child.

The Child is reunited with his hammock inside the berth, more so for Mando’s benefit than his — though he doesn’t protest against the solace he seeks in the bundle of old shirts from his guardian — if he’s to get answers out of the Girl, it’s best not to have a looming toddler in the vicinity. “What’s the matter with you?” he questions in the cockpit doorway, peering over her shoulder and unto the navigation panel.

“Nothing. Putting in the coordinates. We need to go back and return the artefact right?”

“That’s not what I’m referring to.”

The Girl sighs, her fingers never faltering. “I’m not discussing this with you.”

“You’re stuck with me on my ship-”

“You’re stuck with me _ , _ actually, and I don’t have to explain myself to a metal pole.”

The Crest’s landing gear retracts to its underbelly as the Girl flips a switch and pulls a lever, lifting the craft off the ground and out of the atmosphere. When they’ve reached hyperspace, she activates the autopiloting controls and forfeits her seat but he doesn’t advance. She attempts a side step pass, but he captures her arm between his leather and commands her to arrest her movements. She complies with little bitterness in her mannerisms, refusing to make eye contact — it’d be one-sided with the barrier anyways. He sizes her up quickly before continuing, “If you cause harm to the Child, it will be the last thing you ever do.”

The Girl was attempting to not implode with frustration at his accusations, desperately clinging to the flame inside herself for it not to get out of control and overpower her perspective nor actions, but  _ fuck  _ he’s so stubborn; so metalheaded. She hisses, “He’d be dead right about now if it wasn’t for me! Don’t start on me cause you can’t manage to keep him safe yourself.”

“We’ve been fine until you showed up; pointing rifles at us, dragging us to planets for your credits.”

The fire is stoked, a large rod of beskar persistently prodding the flames and enticing a reaction of it. It soars harshly and soot floats high above the flames, the little black specks travelling with violent wind and carrying themselves to rest in the darkness, forgotten. She leers at the visor with dusky irises and a scowl written across her face, with sour lacing her tongue she urges his own fury that she’d yet to see, “Then do something about it.” It’s a tempting invitation and he considers taking it up; show her the severity of his statements and the extent of his capabilities in combat — give her a  _ real  _ fight they hardly made a dent in back on the ridge. He’d surely had a year’s worth of snide remarks from her and they needed to stop, otherwise, he would end up quarrelling with her like she’s instigating. 

When he doesn’t respond to her invitation she thrusts a hand against his breastplate in retaliation, it hardly does as much as nudge him but it  _ does  _ manage to cause something to simmer within himself. Then she does it  _ again,  _ this time it’s more of a jab and it’s enough for him to feel it underneath the armour. She taunts, “You want me gone?  _ Then do something about it. _ ”

It’s instant — a reflex — how he digs his fingers into her arm and pushes her against the wall beside the cockpit entrance, the door opens upon sensing the movement but just as quickly closes once more. Mando listens to the strangled groan escaping her throat upon the harsh impact, reminding him of the pained noises he’d triggered back on the ridge. The pressure around her arm reduces moderately, but he denies her the privilege of personal space.

“Are you done?”

She fights against his dominance, pushing and punching the beskar half-heartedly. It’s not enough to elicit his surrender and he stays firmly planted ahead of her, providing minimal space to continue her attempts. It’s jarring how mediocre her combat skills are in contrast to her talents with a blaster in her arms — he questions how he let her lead him to the ridge in the first place, surely he could have defeated her back in the hut. It would’ve saved himself a whole lot of time.

Her unrestricted hand pushes against his pauldron in false hope he’d resolve and back off. He doesn’t, not even when she snakes the appendage across his collarbone and nestles it in the soft of his neck seal. Her digits are desperate as they dig into the fabric and tug; Mando bites the inside of his cheek as he’s herded nearer — and he allows it. When she’s close to his visor, she stares holes into it and growls, “Let me go, wiseass.”

_ Wiseass.  _ Migs Mayfeld had insulted him with the same weak comment a week or so prior. 

“Are you done?” he repeats.

The Girl grumbles profanities under her breath, but raises her volume to voice one, “ _ Fuck you. _ ” She hastily raises her hand higher and he catches a glimpse of bandaged fingers before he feels the tremors throughout his helmet, her digits grasping at the edge of beskar. There’s hesitance in her intentions, ambivalent whether she was crossing a line — and she recognised she was but there’s a trace of determination to discover what lays behind the steel, look into his eyes as he realises she introduced him to the galaxy. The Mandalorian’s response is speedier than hers — if not for her reluctance — and he tears her fingers from the steel to compress the hand between the wall directly above her head.

Underneath the barricade of steel he glowers, an outspread frown lining his lips and creases between his eyebrows and it portrays through the visor, if her expression suggested — her eyes are padded with softness, a tenderness sparkle in her pupils and Mando feels himself loosen at the sight. 

The difference between their size is thought-provoking. The Girl looks small and timid at a distance so… _ intimate.  _ Compared to the looming tower of beskar before her, she’s nothing more than a fragile slab of transparisteel just waiting for enough force to shatter her into minuscule pieces. Mando takes her wrists still firmly planted above her head into consideration and how she doesn’t make an attempt to escape the leather bindings — though, with enough drive a quickly raised knee would have him off her in a matter of seconds, but she doesn’t engage, doesn’t even seem interested in the idea. In fact, she feels limp in his grip as though she’d surrendered. 

She sighs, “I guess this is deemed ‘doing something’ in your language. So now what?”

Mando ponders, his own dull eyes dancing across her in thought but he comes up with zilch. She waits for a reaction, half-expecting him to kick her off the Crest; swiftly return to the ground and desert her on the planet where she’d be trapped until another unfortunate soul crosses her path and she claims their ship, but he hardly moves. She’s uncertain if he’s even breathing under all that get-up.

She eyes a gloved forefinger as it nears her face, her heart rate picking up speed as it swipes along one of the cheeks of her mask —  _ he’s toying with her.  _ Retribution for her attempts at removing his helmet she gathers, but she’s shown otherwise when the vocoder picks up the crackles within, “Why do you wear this thing?” The voice is  _ significantly  _ lower and she’s fortunate for the face covering to hide the heat in her cheeks the sound manages to elicit. 

Her eyes are uncertain where to fall; the leering visor hardly a forearms distance from her face or his encasing body because that’s all she can manage to see with Mando taking up so much of her vision — not that she’s  _ completely against  _ the implicative stance, especially when her ears can detect the faintest of breathing underneath the steel from being so densely jammed. She opts for the ground but not before giving his body a once-over, eyeing the cushioning of his flight suit which looks compressible and  _ so spongy. _

The Mandalorian flickers his attention to her unbound hand still firmly planted above her, a pathetic grin reaching his lips at her obliviousness. She hadn’t even grasped he’d let go.

“Why do you wear yours?” 

“That's not an answer.”

“Does — does there need to be one?”

The Mandalorian’s beskar helmet tilts slenderly. “Is there?”

“It was a gift. I don’t take it off in front of strangers; it’s intended to discourage others from starting something they can’t finish.”

“You took it off in front of me,” his head readjusts back to sit upright, “why?”

She chuckles and shakes her head, her free hand peeling from the durasteel wall at long last. “Figured we wouldn’t be strangers for long and it seems I was right,” her eyes land upon his visor and Mando sucks in a shallow breath, “I mean, look at us, sharing our little origin stories — well, one of us.”

His leathers fall from her face and idle beside him limply, but he remains attached to her other arm keeping her secured to her position. There’s something inside him just refusing to release—telling him he shouldn’t or  _ can’t  _ and he listens to it despite not having total comprehension of the impulse. 

The Girl doesn’t seek answers from him in return; a fresh but seldom occurrence in his life. There’d always been someone with the determination to uncover his secrets — his individuality separate from the armoured persona he feigns into existence each day — but not her. Other than the feeble effort earlier, that Mando was certain was just to rile him up, she’s disinterested. Completely unmotivated and indifferent to the man behind the beskar.

He’s unsettled whether he finds the foreign state settled within himself as gratitude or dismay; the knotting in the abyssal of his abdomen provide no insights.

The Girl wobbles against the wall and glances above her to the wrist that’s beginning to numb with the blood rushing downwards. The Mandalorian succumbs to her unspoken request and repositions them so that he’d keep his clench but allow her to manipulate it ahead. She sighs and twiddles her fingers to recover from the stiffness, her tendons nudge against each other underneath his leathers. 

His inactive hand beside him twitches with desire and entertains its ambition, lifting it to clasp her hand — disregarding the faint glance she delivers — and his digits fuss with a bandage strand around her middle finger until it loosens around the slender finger. Ivory-coloured threads are dainty in his leathers; thin, delicate, but abrasive. They’re cheap wrappings, definitely not the kind to be used across an entire limb; two no less.

“Don’t,” she murmurs, fingers twitching in his palm. 

He stops, the first layer of bandages swaying beneath their united hands. When she doesn’t move, doesn’t make an effort to retract, he carefully continues. It unravels with ease, as though they’d been aching to come undone and expose the skin underneath. The tips of her fingers are the first to touch the stale air, though he sees no distinctness from his own hands; softer, of course, smaller and gentler, too, but nothing out of the ordinary. 

The Mandalorian continues, his touches filled with such a strong tenderness he didn’t know he possessed; his hands aren’t designed to touch in such a precarious manner, they’re not accustomed to the recognition of mortality. He’s killed more people than he can account their faces for, he’d always been a roguish character — until he met the Child. The kid ripped him of his cynical nature and demonstrated pure faith in the Mandalorian; he always chalked it up to a child’s innocence but, standing before the Girl, Mando understands the drastic transformation he’d succumbed to at the hands of a little alien child’s conviction of protection. 

Having a taste of that is unadulterated bliss and he craves more. 

Wishes for a soul to gaze at him with confidence that isn’t related to his abilities. 

The concept is pushed aside, far from reach in the depths of his mind; it’s a luxury he cannot afford with his lifestyle.

He reverts his focus to the bandages, peeling to uncover her flesh underneath. The back of her hand is covered with blisters and her knuckles are lined with open wounds, a drop of blood seeps from a slit and rolls down her forefinger. Mando’s eyes soften as he examines her. The blisters disappear underneath the untouched bandages of her forearm and he can only presume her entire limb is covered with the identical injuries, the other arm too — perhaps her  _ entire  _ body. A lone forefinger strokes a trail across the back of her hand and she flinches away at the contact, the rough leather proving too harsh against sensitive skin.

“What happened?” the vocoder crackles. 

The Girl’s head shakes and she withdraws from him, snatching her arm out of his everlasting grip. It leaves him feeling frigid without the contact and it utterly bewilders him. Her warmth could barely be felt through the thick of his gloves yet the difference is outstandingly evident. 

“It’s a long story.”

“We won’t be landing for a while.”

The whirring of electricity, the faint beeping from the control panel, the hum of the Crest’s engines are all too deafening when the cockpit plunges into silence and the Girl stands as stiff as stone, except for a thick swallow as she eases out of her confines against durasteel. 

“I trusted the wrong people.”

“Did — did they do this to you?” 

She shrugs and begins rewrapping the bandages, “Partially.”

“Why?”

“As I said, it’s a long story.” With that, she leaves.

_ It’s bare without her presence. Vacant.  _

He’s left alone, again.

The whirring and beeping only magnified without her mass and the Mandalorian awkwardly transfers himself to the pilot seat with a thick sigh laced with exhaustion, unconfident in his decisions. Maybe he pushed her too far — forced her into subjecting herself in front of him like that. Oddly enough, she didn’t appear mad or upset even. Still, he’s unsettled with himself. 

It doesn’t stop him from prying into his perceptions, though.

Something happened between her and another—something that made his stomach twist with uneasiness.

He exhales. Needles of streaking stars hypnotically flash outside the viewport and he squeezes his eyes shut, throws his helmet against the headrest, and sits like that for a moment. The Girl is unreadable. Some would say they were an identical copy of each other — Peli. Peli would definitely say that — only she didn’t need a helmet to hide her expressions. 

His helmet lifts with a hiss between his thumb and forefinger and he removes the surrounding beskar, twisting it in his hand to face himself. In the reflection of his visor, he considers himself, wearied brown irises examining the figure as though it wasn’t him. Curls of brown strands stick to his forehead with a sheen of sweat, the shaggy strings unkempt. The hair lining his jaw and upper lip were a little more than whiskers now — having a Child and a Girl onboard didn’t provide privacy for him to keep it tamed these days. 

Eyes peel away from the visor and he rests the beskar amidst his lap, throwing his head back to feel the leather underneath his skull. His armour was a part of him, it had been ever since he swore to the Creed, but it was little instances like these he often missed; having the feeling of something so raw pressed against his skin. 

The feeling of another pressed against his skin.

It’d been a  _ long  _ time since he’d felt that warmth.

The Girl was warm, soft too. Mando marvels at the sensation of her fingertips running through his hair, the strands twirling around her digits  _ without  _ the bandages — pure skin on skin contact. They’d feel so smooth against his cheekbones, his neck,  _ elsewhere.  _

She looked so small before him, trapped against the durasteel with her arms restricted. He could easily pick her up and just—

“Blast,” he groans. He’s going to go stir crazy being stuck with a — a girl so… so… “ _ Mesh’la _ .”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Mesh'la" - beautiful
> 
> Well good morning to you all, hope you liked the chapter! It was fun to write.   
> I have the next one written just need to edit it but it's currently sitting at 5.4k (rip) so I hope you guys like longer chapters cause I'm not sure if I'll split it this time.


	7. Almost There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Mandalorian and the Girl find themselves pinned down yet again, but Mando can't seem to get other thoughts regarding the Girl out of his head which only causes further challenges in their circumstance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is on the longer side than my others with a whopping 6.1k, feel free to grab a bucket of popcorn and strap in. It gets steamy.

_ She doesn’t even know. _

The Girl is so oblivious to the Mandalorian’s lustful gazes and he blames it on the visor, but  _ that’s  _ just a pipe dream. Even a Miraluka could take one pathetic shot in his direction and see his thirst for his passenger. Kriff, it radiates off him in waves so powerful they could probably  _ smell  _ it lingering on his flight suit but not her. Or, at least, her body language and the way she holds herself together — with so little effort while he’s cursed with mental conflicts at every glance, every touch — didn’t indicate otherwise. No longer could he lie to himself and say it’s just ‘been a while’ since his last moment of weakness because he knew —  _ and it terrified him  _ — that the heart palpitations and lingering touches were more than a desperate attempt to quench some selfish ploy of relief.

Mando dabbles at the idea that maybe,  _ hopefully,  _ she feels the same towards him; that by some chance she finds herself with a hand down her pants, thoughts occupied by silver steel and the soft blacks of a flight suit with his modulated baritone urging her on. She’s always sitting in the darkened corners of the Crest’s hold, after all, a place where the light doesn’t stretch and provides minimal privacy behind the carbonite pods and supply crates. It’s the most solitude one can seek on the vessel outside the cockpit cabin and the Mandalorian’s berth. It’s a concept so beyond reach he doesn’t spend much time playing with the threads. He shifts behind her uncomfortably, nonetheless.

“What are you doing?”

There’s a mite of interest in her expression as her eyes briefly fall on his visor and dipping lower before swiftly returning to eye-level, it causes him to squirm and attempt to cover himself in fear she’ll see something profoundly embarrassing. She hasn’t seemed to notice and he sighs, relaxes some. It doesn’t last long. She’s too close to him. The Girl’s body heat radiates off her and washes over the beskar, engulfing him with the warmth of the sun's rays and it does nothing if not serve his desires. 

He feels hot underneath the helmet and he can’t blame it on the terrain. Not this time.

It’s such a precarious position that he struggles to keep his head on straight, thoughts of inappropriate actions flowing like the violent volcanic rivers on Nevarro—this wasn’t the time nor place to imagine such behaviour but it doesn’t stop there. His mind is a traitor against himself but his body demonstrates it’s betrayal even more so; a hot track of blood leading down his front and settling in his crotch.

“Wha-” he swallows, his throat dry, “what?”

Mando’s hard-on only grows as moments pass and he tries to preserve  _ some  _ decency by tilting away from the Girl, gnawing on his lower lip in a mix of frustration and disgust at himself. She doesn’t notice the stiffness scarcely brushing against her, and if she did she blames it on the holstered blaster—the one that was most definitely  _ not  _ in its holster. 

“It’s the kid isn’t it?”

_ The...kid?  _ Oh yeah… “Right,” he redirects.

“He’ll be fine, Mando.” She sits back on her knees, edging rearwards against him, “I secured the cockpit door so he won’t be practising his piloting skills any time soon. We couldn’t have brought him with us and these people aren’t exactly the babysitting type.”

The words evaporate into steamy puffs of air dispelling from her mouth before him — it’s forlorn to even try to concentrate on her talking with her warmth so proximate. There are only a few layers of clothing and armour between them. He’s so close to pressing against her body and feeling her unhindered warmth on his bare skin. So close to touching something alive without the barrier of leather. There’s nothing, in reality, he can grasp onto, not when she’s so near yet so distant.

_ Especially not  _ so when she unexpectedly twists her entire body to face him and braces one of her arms on his breastplate, his helmet tipping to eye the limb in confusion. “What’re-” he’s cut short when she applies pressure and slams him against the ground below him. When he makes impact with the hard stone underneath he can’t help but release a confined grunt and he curses the vocoder's disloyalty. The Girl doesn’t stop there, no, that'd be too fortunate — or unfortunate, he still hasn’t decided. She raises a blaster and squeezes against the antagonising trigger, a quick beam of light dispelling from the barrel and impairing a body he hadn’t realised was there; he let his guard down too easily. With a crane of his neck, he watches it tumble down a ledge of rocks and come to rest at the bottom, the wound billowing with smoke.

“Pull your damn head in the game!” she exclaims and glances down beneath her— _ between her thighs _ —where he laid in a heaving pile of beskar, his hands awkwardly placed on her the curve of her knee to steady himself or that’s what he tells himself. “This is the second time we’ve been pinned down in a week. I thought your kind is meant to be some sorta all-mighty warriors.”

“Can’t —  _ fuck,  _ can’t concentrate, _ ”  _ he growls.

Because who in the right state of mind would be able to concentrate with a Girl practically sitting on their lap, anchoring them between the ground and her very warmth; he certainly couldn’t.

“What? Why the hell-” Her eyes latch onto something in her peripherals and they widen, observing. Mando adjusts his head to follow her concern but he sees nothing. Nobody is attempting another sneak attack, no potential threats, no magical baby appearing out of thin air—nothing. “Shit! You’re hit, Mando. Why didn’t you tell me you were hit?” She goes to reach for his arm but decides not to, worried she’ll only cause the wound to irritate.

He questions her because  _ how  _ did he not feel getting shot, “Hit? I didn’t - didn’t notice.”

“Didn’t — do you hear yourself? You’re not  _ made  _ of beskar, Mando. Stop acting like a droid.”

Mando sighs and rolls his head against the ground, “Will you just take out the rest so we can leave?”  _ And so he can lock himself away for the remainder of the night. _

“Oh sure,” she grouches, “get a little love tap and get the armourless girl to finish the job for ya.” The Girl readjusts her position behind their barrier of rock formations to peer from behind them, her eyes skimming along the landscape and counting the enemies. “Seems like there’s only two left. Wait here.”

“Don’t go out there,” he groans and grabs his bicep, crimson coating the tan tips of his gloves. “They’ll shoot you as soon as you move.” She provides him with a look that suggests he be quiet and he does so, reluctantly, recognising her stubborn expression from many klicks away.

“Sit here and try not to get shot again. I can’t carry all this load.”

“Load?”

She slyly smiles. “You’re heavy.”

The Mandalorian stabilises himself now that her weight has vanished and her warmth with it. There’s an endeavour to lift his blaster and assist but his bicep aches more than he’s letting on, so he does as he’s told and sits there anticipating her safe return while clogging the wound with his thumb; the arousal in his pants long dissipated, getting shot would do that to a man. Echoes of blaster fire erupt in the tightly-packed cave and it lights the icicles hanging above in hues of glowing reds. It’s followed by pained grunting, a touch of additional blaster fire, and then silence. Mando holsters his blaster against his thigh and begins to stand up, confident the Girl has taken care of the remainder of the enemies.

The battlefield is in a right mess with the deceased strewn throughout the area, each one consisting of dedicated smoking wound somewhere amidst their bodies. Mando watches fresh blood spill from their gashes and traces through the pearly whites of snow to melt a trail in its wake, merging from man-to-man. 

He feels uneasy—like he was forgetting something and the Girl’s frantic yelling quickly reminds him, “Get down!” Mando was counting the fire on either end and the Girl had only shot once. There’s still one left — but he’s sluggish on his feet with his head so muddled, he doesn’t manage to follow her directions promptly. He feels the force of impact first, nothing more than a diminutive thrust against his back, and then the pain settles in and it’s ghastly.

It burns him from the inside, the beam nestling its way into the deep muscles and boiling the blood around it. Mando keels over in pain, dropping to his hands and knees and crunching the snow underneath his fingers to avoid yelling in agony. The fire of another blast falls on deaf ears but he takes satisfaction in watching the body limp to a pile on the ground, the prowling opponent void of life from a simple squeeze of the Girl’s trigger.

She accompanies his side in a kneel, her hands easing his cloak to that adjacent of the wound to examine the injection. “They - they fucking wanted me to leave your side. I didn’t see him slinking away. I’m so sorry, Mando,” she says, and he tries to console her but can only make do with a groan instead. He lurches when her fingers near the sensitive tissue and she curses to herself, “Fuck!”

“Th-that bad?”

“It ain’t pretty,” she confesses, “probably needs cauterising.”

Mando groans but she mistakes it for agony and readjusts her hands positioning, sliding one from his back and over his waist to rest on the cushioning of his abdomen. “Here, lift yourself.” He complies and clings to her as a support beam, noting the comforting hand on the solid of beskar plates lining his spine — beskar that was so close to shielding him from this hassle. 

He protests, “Need to report to the client.”

“That can wait.”

“Your credits—”

“It can wait, Mando.”

Even though the clientele was located closer than the Crest — and it’s only reasonable to make a pit stop to avoid having to return — she’s not backing down from her perspective and who’s he to argue in his condition. “Oh-kay,” he exhales in a whisper.

His mobility is limited with the panging burrowing in his back and he finds it challenging to keep moving. He could hardly even stand up straight without leaking blood, but he’s been through worse. As long as his legs continue to function, he doesn’t afford any breaks along the way. “We can take a moment,” the Girl says beside him, his arm limply thrown around her shoulders, “you can catch your breath.”

“I’m fine,” he professes. “Just a little more.”

The Crest enhances in the distance as they near, a thick coating of white submerging the hull in a cold layer but it’s surely a lot better inside than out — he just hopes the kid wasn’t going to get ill. He’s not exactly trained in dealing with sick children.

The Girl’s consistent glances behind never cease, her eyes surveying the plains for any potential lurkers organising an ambush though she’d taken care of the last of them back in the cave; Mando was sure of it. She studies the tracks of carmine contrasting against the frost behind them and tries not to fret for the Mandalorian’s blood loss. He labours an arm to his vambrace and clicks a button extending the hatch. It pushes the snow outwards as it scrapes along the ground, covering their boots with a thick frigid layer. “Okay, come here,” she reinforces her grip on him to avoid a scuffle against the slippery slope and he gripes under his breath as he leverages himself on her. 

The Crest is totally unrecognisable. There’s scattered wrappings of nourishments and the Mandalorian’s spare clothing lining the surface of the hold — it’s everywhere; in the corners, on the supply crates, hanging off the netting, you name it. The Child had a field day without their supervision.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have left him alone,” she says.

Mando sighs and shakes his head before planting himself atop a crate, brushing one of his spare shirts onto the floor. “Wore himself out,” he gestures to the open sleeping berth where a mischievous little baby slumbered on the Mandalorian’s berth with a wrinkled forehead and blue goo staining his mouth. 

The Girl shuts the door to the berth. “Probably for the best, don’t want him seeing you like this. Where’s your medpacs?”

“There should be one in the weapons unit.”

She teases, “Trust me to go in there?”

He laboriously chuckles and thumbs his vambrace, watching the doors swing open. “Go right ahead.”

The Girl sifts through the lower half of the locker in search of medical supplies — which takes longer than it should with the abundance of junk he’s collected — and she returns with a small package, a hand sorting through the necessities. “All right, let me see that back of yours.”

“I can do it.”

“Oh, yeah? Then take this.” 

The cauteriser is held at the same height as his helmet ahead of him and it’s easily reachable if not for the twinge in his back and arm, but he’s not one to back down from a stubborn challenge. His arm extends for the instrument, his muscles twitching as he nears, and he barely feels the tips of his fingers touch the bottom of it before he retracts. “Fine — fine, you win,” he gasps.

“That’s what I like to hear,” she chortles.

The Mandalorian twists and hunches over to introduce the gushing wound underneath the cool lighting of the Crest. The dark liquid acts as an adhesive and causes his flight suit to cling to his skin, but she’s careful when she peels the fabric from the wound to slip her fingers underneath and gain traction on his skin. Mando straightens his back sharply.

“Am I hurting you?”

No… No - you’re…” The words stray off because what’s he to say? That the feeling of her fingers — albeit covered in bandages — on his bare skin induces a shiver that dances across his spine? He composes himself, “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

The Girl nods and continues, spreading the slit of his shirt enough to insert the tip of the cauteriser. She warns him of the impending pain, “Do you want something to — squeeze?”

“No.”

The cauteriser hums to life and he swallows thickly at the sheer sound. It sparks against his reactive wound and  _ fuck  _ he should’ve got something to squeeze. The perpetual vibrations numb the skin around it somewhat, but it’s still predominantly inflicting agony on his lesion. He tries to focus on something other than the zapping or of his other wound still bleeding and just as sore. So, he retreats to the confines of his mind — an infrequent occurrence that seemed to only be increasing as of late — and maps out his intentions following the departure of this damned icy rock, but he comes up blank. He’d just been travelling from planet to planet in search of credits and he was still shorthanded in his savings from commissions. At this rate, the Girl would be sticking around with him for a little while longer.

_ Not that that was an entirely unfavourable thought. _

She’s proven how resourceful—how benevolent she was and it’s an endearing change of pace from his usual passengers; the one’s he ultimately freezes in carbonite. It’s habitual how he presumes each character as shady or somebody to be on guard around, and he wants to break the tradition — wants to put his faith in another. Sure, the Girl had her secrets but so did he and every other person he’d been acquainted with. If her supreme plans are to seize the Child and return him to The Client, she’s taking an  _ awfully  _ prolonged route. Judging by her behaviour towards the kid,  _ that’s  _ the last thing on her mind.

“Almost there,” she whispers and it makes the hairs on his neck stand tall. The cauteriser dips further into his shirt to seal the remainder of the wound and he clenches his fists as it burns closed, “and done.”

The Girl relocates herself so she stands before him and gently grabs hold of his arm, urging him to twist it to showcase the other wound. “This one ain’t so bad,” she assures, “here, a bacta patch should do it justice.” The Mandalorian engages her outstretched hand, retrieves the patch, and fails to apply it. “Pass it here.”

He grumbles, “Just rip it.”

“Are — are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She considers his request, eyes the visor for affirmation, and proceeds to stretch the fabric until the threading loosens and begins to tear revealing the tan muscles she was denied from his back thanks to the blood. There’s more room to work a patch underneath the sleeve now, and she takes it upon herself to collect the dressing and shimmy it through the slit. “Is this comfortable?” she says, situating the patch across a muscle. He shifts it enough to test it’s mobility and nods his head when he’s satisfied with the placement. She administers the patch and secures it in position, but her hands don’t retract. They rest across the patch, her fingertips bent around the curves of his muscles,  _ and they dig in.  _

Mando grunts quietly and he owes his life to the vocoder for not picking it up. 

It’s only when a strong breeze of wind files through the hatch that she pulls away, shivering. He closes the door with a click of his vambrace and returns his attention to the Girl, observing as she rubs her arms in a weak attempt to provide herself with some warmth. He also takes notice of his blood on her bandages, his eyes latching onto the tips of her fingers as they trail up and down. “Come here,” he holds out a hand and ushers her towards him, his leathers working the strands and she shrinks back slightly but with two simple words, she permits him, “let me.”

Mando unfurls the bandages on either hand. She’d been consistently applying bacta — when he reminded her to — and it’s starting to show it’s progress. The wounds on her knuckles were nothing more than mere scratches now and the bumpiness and blisters had faded and been replaced with smooth flesh. They’re still red and appeared sore, but they’re much better than the last time he saw them. The tainted wrappings are discarded and he retrieves a pair of bacta patches from the medpac. “Should do it justice,” he mimics and she rolls her eyes. Mando supplies either hand with a patch, which takes up the majority of the backs so he rubs a thumb over the exposed knuckles in respite. “How’s that?”

“G-good,” she clears her throat and sucks in her bottom lip between her teeth. “You should get some rest and let those wounds heal. I’ll clean this place up, go report back to the clientele, and put in the coordinates for wherever we’re going next.”

He sighs as her hands retract from his and he lifts himself off the crate, pausing when the movement causes his back to twinge. “It’s fine, I can pilot.”

“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

“Don’t want to disturb the kid. It’s too difficult getting him back to sleep once he wakes.”

“Fine,” she gives up, “just go sit down. I’ll clean the mess and be back within the hour.”

He wants to decline her proposal, tell her to forget the mess and leave the credits until morning when, hopefully, it’ll be warmer. Instead, he trudges to the cockpit ladder, removes yet another article of clothing from the rungs, and climbs. It’s troublesome and overwhelms his muscles but he makes it to the top.

The Mandalorian seats himself in his chair with a puff of exhaustion and extends his legs as far they’ll reach underneath the cramped space of the navigational controls which beeps as a greeting. The cockpit’s cabin must’ve been the only region of the Crest that remains untouched by the Child’s tornado of destruction, though the little knob of his control throttle had been pinched yet again. Hadn’t the Girl sealed the doors? Perhaps the kid already had the knob before they left — Mando couldn’t recall. It seemed so long ago.

The Girl’s rummaging downstairs clears into silence and he listens out for her footsteps, but they’re too light to pick up with Beskar surrounding his ears. He could enhance the range with a click of his vambrace but resolves not to pry and rather gaze out the viewport. It’s dark out there, only being lit by the twin moons in the distance. They’re half-full—half-empty maybe—and shine brighter than the one back on Arvala-7, but they still had a dullness to them and the clouds overhead obstructed their full potential of illumination. 

His eyes tear away and instead focus on the departing figure, watching as the Girl pulls her poncho against her body and her legs pick up pace in the direction of the small town they visited prior to the shootout; it’s not too far and with her momentum, she’d be in and out quicker than he would, but he can’t stop from grumbling to himself. He should have told her to wait until morning, then he could accompany her if anything were to go wrong. 

She’s more than capable of handling her own when put to the test so he tries not to think about it, lets himself remain guilt-free until something  _ does  _ happen. 

Mando concentrates on nothing, his mind transparent for the first time in a long time and it feels freeing. Until it isn’t. Until it's filled with the ghosting whispers of a tranquil voice mouthing encouraging words through his filters, “ _ Almost there, _ ” and he breathes  _ deep _ , a hand groping his arousal with a do-or-die manner. He’s tried ignoring it and letting it resolve itself; even getting shot at. It’s not something he can continue giving the cold-shoulder to, and he concludes that if he delivers a swift relief — ideally — he’ll be at peace for a little while before ultimately recovering.

So he gets to work — because that’s all it is: work. It’s not a potential for indulgence just something he has to do to refrain from uncomfortable tension. He’s so preoccupied with just getting it over and done with that he doesn’t even remove his gloves, doesn’t reach inside his pants, just hopes it’ll be adequate succour with his leathers kneading through the material.

It’s not adequate at all. Palming himself through the thick of his flight suit doesn’t provide enough friction and he craves more intimacy. Intimacy he couldn’t find within himself but one he can, at the very least, feign a replication of. He sighs hopelessly and eliminates himself from the confines of his glove, places the leather on the control panel ahead of him, and slides the bare hand beneath his trousers to wrap tan fingers around his length. It’s an improvement—more personal—but his shoulders remain stiff and he can’t find it within himself to relax.

Wrist movements falter with each stroke and he can’t move his arm without inflicting pain — it’s so fucking unbearable. Here he was finally able to submit to his body’s pathetic desires having received privacy and yet, the rhythm is all off; the tempo he found most pleasurable so fucking far from reach, he was on an entirely different planet from it. Desperate, he jerks his hand in a rough movement and moans — but not from pleasure, far from it. The muscles lining his back cramp around the burnt lesion and strain the flesh, he throws his head back against the chair and draws in a shaky breath. 

He’s about to forfeit, surrender to a phantom of an enemy equipped with a blaster in its hand, and then, “ _ Do you need my help again?” _

The Mandalorian freezes; completely immobilising himself because what the fuck is he supposed to do in this situation? How does he explain this? He can’t explain it—not even if she was blind. A set of panic-struck eyes catch a glimpse of the Girl standing behind the pilot’s chair through the reflection of the viewport, her own pupils eyeing the outline of a hand through his pants.  _ Fuck.  _ He’s swift, retracting his hand and leaning forwards in his seat to cover himself in the hopes she won’t question him—won’t fret about the tension this will absolutely produce, and he ignores the sharp stings in his back that beg him to ease back. “Why — why’re you ba-ck so soon?”

“Been gone a while, Mando.”

_ Mando.  _ She wasn’t even saying  _ his  _ name just his title, one that didn't solely belong to him, but fuck she says it so sweetly; so softly. Wait….  _ a while? _

“Sit back,” she orders, firm hands on either pauldron and dragging him backwards. 

As if he couldn’t get harder. 

“What’re you-” Once his back flattens against the seat she dips her hands down his chest, fingertips trailing lines along the armour and he shivers. Fucking shivers. She hasn’t even touched him, but he can feel the weight through the platings and it’s enough to extract such a reaction from him. The Girl leans over the pilot’s chair, her chin resting on one of his pauldrons, and the new angle allows her arm to extend even further downwards. Mando’s heart rate picks up speed, banging against his ribs like a savage akk dog escaping its cage. 

Fingers play with the hem of his pants in a torturous manner, the tips dipping underneath and running dainty caresses along his skin before retreating again and he groans, his ungloved hand grabbing a fistful of the armchair to avoid bucking into her flirtatious gestures. 

Her other hand, one he almost forgot with the other being so fucking cruel, trails along his collarbone and rests between a shoulder and his chest in a half-hug from behind. It keeps him secured to the chair and the helmet inclines a little, his shoulders lifting underneath the weight of her chin. “I said to let the wounds heal,” she murmurs, her lips alongside his helmet. Mando can’t manage words, just breathlessly exhales and twists his head to gaze at her. She’s picturesque from this angle and he hums as she fixes cloudy eyes to his visor, boring a bright heat through the viewfinder.

She takes pity on him and slips her hand through the trim once more, slender fingers coming to slowly wrap around the length and contracts but doesn’t move — not straight away at least — because that’d just be too much mercy on him. It goes without saying he’s savouring every single second he can cling to, memorising the softness as he pulses in her palm and the fingers constricting every few moments to drag it out. 

Dank Farrik, he wasn’t worthy of this — he’s not a good person, but he must’ve done something right to be blessed with such a divine existence and equally ethereal touches. If he was told this was how his night would end, he’d think the world was at the point of termination because  _ why  _ would a Girl so breathtaking dedicate energy on him in such a manner without her own physical compensation?

It’s almost shameful how he’s so on the edge — so close to thrusting himself in her grip — and the sounds he produces are nothing short of pure filth. The Girl  _ finally  _ moves, her hand agonisingly slow as it traverses his entire length up and down in half-hearted strokes. Just like that, with such simple nonchalant gestures, it’s not  _ just  _ a task anymore—not just something he needs to do. It’s something he wants, craves, thirsts for and he grinds his hips into her hands once, twice, thrice. It’s so addictive. She’s so addictive.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” he moans her name causing her to flick her thumb over the tip as a response, a little smile pulling at the edge of her lips. The stranglehold eases some and he almost fucking whines at the lacking contact but her featherweight fingers brush so delicately, and maybe that’s why he nearly moans so ungodly loud and digs his boot into the durasteel wall to restrict himself. He croaks, “Gonna -- gonna fucking destroy me.”

“Hush,” she whispers, patting his collarbone with her free hand, “just let me hear  _ you. _ ”

Dank Farrik.

She hasn’t got the faintest clue of what she does to him, or maybe she  _ does  _ and that’s why she won’t pick up pace — won’t deliver what he beckons. A hand runs from his collarbone to his neck scarf and he feels the faint touch of digits pushing against his chin, inclining his head back. Mando complies with her requests and tilts the helmet back so that his eyes are searching the cabin’s ceiling for  _ anything  _ to lock onto. 

It’s not until his neck is exposed and her fingers run up and down his clothed throat that she gains momentum, her hand stroking the entirety of his length in quick pumps that leaves him with a sheen of sweat across his body and the helmet foggy — something he wasn’t informed could even happen. Not even when he sprinted after enemies did his helmet fog, the filters had always come in aid, but this time they established their boundaries; unable to keep up with his frantic breathing. It’s not a malfunction on their part — the Mandalorian is just so damned fractured from the Girl’s tormenting.

The tip of the Girl’s nose nudges against the neck covering and her face slowly disappears into the softness of the fabric, the thick layer interfering with the touch of her lips on his neck but the motion alone causes him to choke on a breath of oxygen and she takes the opportunity to escalate her wrist. The noises he makes are nothing but undiluted delight; the choking gasps of air, the moaning filtered through the modulator, the cut-off groans and whimpers he attempts to stifle — all of it. The distinctness from the sounds he makes now and the ones of agony earlier don’t go unnoticed by himself and his cheeks flush at the mere thought.

“Almost there,” she encourages and  _ fucking hell  _ it’s like she’s inside his head reading his desires off a holorecord.

He wants to feel more of her - no, he needs to feel more of her.

Mando reaches up with his ungloved hand and brushes a calm stroke along her cheek with his knuckles. She doesn’t move or acknowledge the touch, and maybe he’d take it personally if it wasn’t for the unexpected nip on his neck causing him to startle in his seat. It takes him an embarrassingly long moment to recognise that she’s biting him through the scarf —  _ through the fucking scarf.  _

“Fu-uck,” he groans and involuntarily bucks his hips into her hand greedily, “keep go-ing.”

She generously listens to his pleads, continuing the same rhythm that he so desperately sought after and her teeth vigorously clamp over his skin, surely bruising the flesh and he couldn’t give a shit if it did. There’s a chunk within his heart that  _ hopes  _ it does in fear this is a one-time occurrence, he wants something there to remind him of the ungodly night he was bestowed. 

He’s reaching his climax, her strokes heavenly perfect, and he relaxes in the chair. The Girl’s hand remains sprawled against his throat and he grabs at her wrist, squeezing ever so gently so as to avoid hurting the sore skin underneath the bandages but enough that he can direct some of the pent-up sexual frustration through something other than unconscious hip grinding. 

The Girl must sense his impending peak as she readjusts her head, turns her face to suck in a breath of clean oxygen and mutter, “Come on, Mando,” before latching onto his skin yet again — and it’s all he demanded, a soft murmur of motivation to enable himself to surrender to his body’s pulsing.

What a fucking scene this must be—the girl’s face so deeply burrowed in his neck, her hand in his pants stroking his length with the other sprawled across his throat, and  _ he’s just letting it happen.  _ If only the Creed could see their little foundling now; so fucking submissive under the touch of an  _ aruetii. _

Mando’s eyes squeeze shut and he chokes on his saliva as thick ropes of white dispel from the tip of his length, coating her fingers and his pants in the fluid and it’s  _ a lot.  _ He’s always been one to cum more than the average but  _ dank farrik  _ this had to be a new record. He tremors in his seat and combined with his tarnished pants, he’s a complete fucking mess. It’s sticking to the insides of his flight suit but his attention is redirected immediately upon the Girl’s snaking hand withdrawing from underneath the material, travelling up, up,  _ up  _ and her cum-coated fingers plunge through her lips. She eyes him out of her peripherals.

_ It’s so fucking filthy _ .

“Maker,” he breathes. It’s not an expression he frequented but it's the only one that comes to mind in such a scenario. 

Bare fingers pop out of her mouth with a thin sheen of saliva and she swallows once they’ve locked eyes — then as if she didn’t just ingest his fucking load, she returns upright behind the seat with her hands on his trapezius massaging comforting circles into the muscles. “Will you please take it easy now?”

The Mandalorian is dumbstruck and all he can manage is a staggering nod. He tries to control his breathing and gets his heart rate back down, but it’ll take him a while before he’s finally relaxed again—who can blame him? He’s just had the best orgasm of his life and he didn’t even  _ do  _ anything.

She whispers, her lips brushing against the side of his helmet, “I’ll be in the hold if you  _ need  _ me again.”

“Stay.”

The Girl sighs and taps the back of his helmet. “You need privacy.”

“It stays on.” He wants to swivel the chair around to look at her, but the palming motions on his shoulders are too indulgent to interrupt so he settles on her reflection. “When I sleep, it stays on.”

“That can’t be comfortable.”

“This is the Way.”

_ But he wishes it wasn’t — _ wishes he could take the blasted beskar off, pin her against the wall again, and reciprocate the favour with his mouth on her. Abruptly, he remembers his ungloved hand resting on his abdomen and lifts it to reach behind him. The Girl takes his hand in hers and they both freeze, simply admiring the contrasting sensations on either of their hands. It looks as though it’d been too long since either of them had physical contact with another being. The Mandalorian gazes at the viewport and it aids as he navigates his hand along her arm, trailing lines through the bandages before landing his tips on her shoulder but it hurts his back at this angle and he can’t afford to last longer than a few seconds before she reluctantly swats him away. “If I have to tend to that wound again I’m gonna kill you myself,” she contended. 

He suppresses a chuckle and sighs at her stubbornness. 

The Girl departs from his personal space and plops down in the passenger’s seat, finding a comfortable position against the durasteel wall beside her. Mando twists his helmet to gaze at her through the dark of his visor, his pupils dilating as they drive over her figure. He considers her; considers how indecipherable she is—she just contributed to something he wouldn’t dare ask of another soul and yet she doesn’t seek her own high. She seems satisfied having assisted him and that alone appeared to be enough. It mistified him beyond comprehension.

What did all this mean to their — their what? This isn’t exactly a partnership and he wouldn’t go as far as to say relationship, even in a platonic sense, but what did that leave? Whatever it is, he’s dubious to let his mind wander in fear that it'll only damage their cooperation. It’s not something he wants to focus on after such a breathtaking act, so he doesn’t. The helmet reverts onwards. It had been a while since that whole ordeal started judging by the moons positioning; heading north-west to slumber behind a flock of gloomy clouds. 

Mando seeks solace in his leather seat, head tilted at an angle that’ll surely fabricate a stiff neck in the morning, and he gives the night sky one last gloss over before shutting his eyes and welcoming a blissful sleep he’s been starved off for far too long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "aruetii" - outsider
> 
> I wish I had an inkling of skill when comes to drawing because I've had this scene in my head for like two weeks — it's finally done and I don't know what to do with myself.
> 
> Obligatory smut scene completed, rest assured there will be more.


	8. Blue Milk Pancakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up this chapter is over 8k words...I'm so sorry...

Mando still can’t grasp it actually happened—that he’d been so fortunate to experience such a jaw-dropping night with the Girl, with no ulterior motives no less. Back in his youth, when he was naive and desperate, it wasn’t exactly infrequent for a fling to take advantage of him; spend a quick few minutes so that one may eliminate him in his distraction or gain intel on private matters. The Girl didn’t try that—didn’t want that. She sought to provide him with sweet relief and nothing more, not even her own relief.

He felt so fucking worshipped.

Mando is the first of them to wake in the early rise of the sun. He sits there for a moment, savouring the gleaming rays shining through the viewport to warm his beskar and, consequently, his rigid body underneath. The Crest is coated in a layer of ice, corroding the durasteel beneath and, accompanied by the packed snow resting atop, it’s refrigerating the inside of the spacecraft. Mando slips on the discarded glove from overnight—a warmth surfacing his cheeks upon the reminder of last night’s events—and supplies friction to either hand in the prospect it’ll produce warmth. It’s wishful thinking. 

Granting him the opportunity to adjust to his surroundings, Mando stretches in his chair and virtually  _ moans  _ at the pulsations ranging through his limbs. It starts at his shoulders and travels through his core, nudging against the wound on his back and easing the tension out of his muscles, and reaches to the bottom of his toes which practically curl with delight. 

Mando considers removing the helmet to rub his eyes—the crust in the corners a botheration—lift it a tad in the least, but he doesn’t get the chance. The Child coos beside him, his little arms reaching up for assistance.

“How did you get up here?” he asks, placing him on his knees. The Child doesn’t answer—why would he—and concentrates on balancing across the joints to tinker with deactivated buttons of the nav controls. “Where to, kid?” Mando scans the system’s database for a paragon planet to hunker down for a few days; spend some time with the kid— _ and the Girl, of course _ —before being ripped away from the semi-domestic life and continue on his unwritten path of planet-hopping.

There’s a planet not too far; small population, plenty of wilderness for the kid to explore, and there’s not much traffic that passes through. It’s good, perfect almost, and Mando is hesitant to accept the temptation. The Child’s head rotates to look at his guardian, his large green ears twitching curiously. He sighs and sets the coordinates for the planet despite his better judgement. It’s too fortunate; the last ‘safe’ planet they visited ended up in him protecting an entire village and the kid almost being killed. Although, he’s made a trustworthy ally who’ll assist if something were to go down. He glances behind him at the Girl, raking his brown eyes across her contorted body in the seat.

“Hang on, kid.” Mando lifts himself out of the pilot chair, leaving behind a monitoring toddler in his place, and kneels beside the Girl in the passengers. She’s sleeping peacefully and he doesn’t disturb her, despite the positioning she’s managed to get herself into. It’s unpleasant on his eyes and it couldn’t be comfortable. With a tremble in his back muscles, he reaches behind his neck and peels the cloak from his armour to drape it across her figure, relying on it to provide at least a small portion of warmth to her. She clasps the garment slightly and a smile surfaces his lips, his leathers coming up to brush a stroke across her cheek faintly—only lasting a second or two before detaching from her like an uncooperative magnet. Once she’s finally soothed back into position, Mando retrieves the safety belt from beside her and secures it across her waist before grudgingly tearing away from the Girl. “Looks like you’re with me.”

The Child squeals with enjoyment as the Mandalorian returns to his seat.

“Shh,” he instructs, glancing back to see the Girl motionless. He sighs with relief.

Mando joins the buckle’s latches together and wraps an arm around the Child to secure him against himself. The thrusters wake with a roar and quake the craft’s hull, the ion accelerator chamber thawing the thrusters nozzles of their icy barricade— _ shit, the ice.  _ It’ll pose a threat, a handicap at the minimum if it doesn’t defrost soon enough. He cringes as the Crest whines against the glacier's dominance on his landing gear, but with the newly-maintenance thrusters, it’s no match against the craft. It rips from the ice and retracts to the hull’s underbelly, allowing Mando to manipulate the ship through the sky and out of the atmosphere; slabs of ice and snow descend to the ground beneath them. 

The feeble bumpiness fades into a smooth flight and Mando activates the autopilot controls. “Not so bad, huh?” He disconnects the buckle from his belt and slips out of the chair, letting the Child sit in the warm leather. “Don’t go touching things—and don’t wake her up,” he quickly adds, noting the Child’s inquisitive staring as though he hadn’t genuinely noticed her earlier. 

Mando sighs and hopes he’ll listen to his request just this once.

The Crest’s hold had been cleaned, just as the Girl promised to do, hardly even a speck of dust surfaced the floor. She’d been busy—and he had just been preoccupied with himself. Mando sighs to himself and browses through his reserved clothing. It mostly consists of bunking apparel—a couple of loose shirts and favourable pants—that he hadn’t had the opportunity to put to use since he fostered the Child. He’s expected—required to remain on the defensive at all times with the Guild breathing down his neck. 

He sorts through the articles and grabs the spare flight suit, his only other. It would be ideal to purchase another, especially now with this one having been ripped, but it wasn’t a necessity presently. The fabric in his hands smells of dirt and grime, residue from the lake he attempted to clean it in all those weeks ago, but it’s better than his current—tattered, bloody, sweaty, and cum-stained. What a combination.

Perhaps he should invest in a refresher for his Crest. That way he wouldn’t be hunched over in the dark corners of the hold, stripping the beskar steel from his body for anybody to stumble across. It didn’t provide much assurance being within eyeshot of the cockpit ladder and with the lack of places to conceal himself, his hurried movements advanced. Then again the sheer thought of the Girl seeing him like this— _ and joining him _ —isn’t unpleasant; it would make the situation a whole lot less embarrassing. 

He peels the last of his beskar from his body and stacks it against the wall, reorienting himself to slip out of his boots. It’s been a while since he last stood without any armour, excluding the helmet, and it feels refreshing in a way. But it doesn’t feel right.

Mando wasted no time in replacing the flight suit, smoothing the fabric out with his gloves and reapplying the ensemble of beskar; each patch of steel fitting snugly where it belongs. It’s slightly more bearable, not having to feel his own mess rubbing against him on the inside of the fabric, and he shoves the dirty flight suit in replace of the clean. He’ll get around to washing it when he has the time—or burn it by virtue of the rip across the arm. 

Speaking of arms, the bacta patch on his bicep had aided the wound significantly and within the next day or two, it should be healed. The lesion on his back was a different story. It’s still sore, somewhat better with a night’s rest, but it’ll be a while before he’s out there firing blasters with that same authority. It could cause jeopardy if he’s not cautious.

The Razor Crest abruptly rumbles and falls into a fit of tremors, hurling the Mandalorian against the stationary carbonite pods with fury. “Shit,” he growls and grips his bicep, pleading he won’t bleed through the fresh clothes so soon. It pulses again and the engines’ whining travels through the ventilation, discharging a high-pitched shriek followed by a low hum of a whistle.

“Man- _ fuck,  _ Mando!” the Girl beckons from upstairs. Mando is quick on his feet up the ladder, clinging desperately to the rungs upon another spasm. “I was sleeping a-and the kid…” She doesn’t need to finish for him to understand, for the Child is sitting underneath the nav panel with colourful cords in his hands; wire coverings peeled away to expose the electricity hazards sparking in his fists.

“Kid, no!” Mando scolds and snatches the cables from his stubborn claws. He babbles a complaint to his guardian as he’s being relocated far away from the electricity. He’s completely dismantled it—Mando will need to implement an entirely new wiring system for the navigation controls alone; a job he’s not suited for. He turns to the Girl for support.

“Don’t look at me,” she raises her hands defensively, “I only know bits and pieces.”

Innocently burbling besides the Mandalorian, the Child watches as leather gloves track across the navigation controls urgently. He’s unbothered by the predicament they’re in—just glad that his guardian had returned to the cockpit’s cabin, it appears. Mando groans in annoyance, fumbling with the nav and fighting against it’s constant glitching. “We’re in luck. There’s a planet on the way. Tatooine. Someone can help us there.” 

“Yeah. Heard of it,” she mutters, regrettably, and he wonders what  _ that  _ is all about but it can wait. It wasn’t the time to sweat over the small details. “We’re not going to crash, are we?”

He contemplates, glancing over the system’s diagnosis and dismisses the electrical yammering it erupts. “Shouldn't—there’ll just be a lot of turbulence.”

That there is—turbulence and a great deal of it. There’s too much to maintain an uncoiled stomach throughout the remainder of the short flight and they’re both surprised when they’re successful in their landing, especially without the contents of their stomach having been dumped over themselves. Peli Motto—an innovative mechanic but a bit too communicatory for the Mandalorian’s preference—stands in her hangar with two greasy hands on her hips, eyes squinting through the viewport to gaze up at Mando.  _ Better have my credits ready to go this time,  _ he can already hear her say and he sighs. Credits he did have, but they weren’t exactly his, and there wasn’t much to spare.

“I’ll see to her,” Mando announces and retrieves the Child, “would you care to join?”

The Girl seems hesitant and peers out the viewport curiously. “Do you trust her?”

Mando takes another glance outside. Peli’s droids are nearing his ship to begin operations but with one stern look from the woman, they back away from the craft. “I do.”

The Girl sighs and peels herself from her seat, fiddling with the cloak that had been laid across her body earlier. “This, uh-”

“Clip it on for me,” he instructs and turns, waiting for familiar hands to run across his shoulders. It takes a moment and he considers retrieving it himself, but he’s patient and it pays off—her fingers playing with the neck covering to manipulate the cloak into place, her digits stroking against the back of his neck underneath all the thick fabric. It’s therapeutic somehow or other. He doesn’t quite understand it himself, but feeling the Girl’s pressure against him relaxes him; eases his eyes closed until all he wants to do is sleep, in her arms preferably and with his head on her chest—his head, not his helmet. Mando wants to press his ear against her flesh and listen to her heartbeat, her breathing, but most of all he just wants to be touched and to touch another.

The Girl smoothes her hands out across the cloak, running her palm down his back and ending just before it reaches the curve at the bottom. “There you go.” She smiles.  _ Fuck _ , her smile. It makes him want to say something stupid, something embarrassing just to get the same reaction out of her; he wants to be the cause of that smile on her face. She adds, “Thank you.”

Mando twists to face her again, his head tilting. “What for?”

“Buckling me up and, uh, giving me the cloak,” she confesses, a timid hue of pink on her cheeks— _ she was blushing.  _ “You could have given it to the kid or just kept it yourself, but… you didn’t. So, thank you.”

He swallows and reaches his hand up—for what, he doesn’t know. It’s not until his digits touch the soft padding of her cheek that he notices he’s making a move, his strokes transforming into uncertain shakes. The Girl’s blush deepens at the contact and she places her hand atop his, giving a quick squeeze of reassurance.

With that, his head is back to sorting through indecent thoughts and actions—but none are related to those they had been previously; they’re not obscene nor lustful. It’s his Creed that they’re unethical towards. He imagines the Girl reaching for his helmet, her slender fingers brushing against his chin as she does so, and lifts the steel to unmask the face that’s been sealed away for a long,  _ long  _ time. If she tried to do it right here, right now, he’s not positive whether he would stop her.

“We shouldn’t keep her waiting, it’ll be rude.”

_ She can wait,  _ is what he wants to say, instead, he murmurs a simple, “Right.”

The Child appears satisfied in Peli’s arms, a large smile on his face as he glares up at the Mandalorian ahead of him. He’s receiving every ounce of attention he can muster out of the woman. “You telling me this little one did all that? Maybe if you gave him a little more attention he wouldn’t be tearing out your cables!”

“What do you mean?” Mando ponders. She runs a finger across the kid’s batwing ears and gestures behind him in the distance where the Girl preoccupies herself tending to their blasters. “What are you getting at?”

“Oh, come on! Do I have to spell it out for you? Are you that oblivious?” She sighs and soothes the Child, “You’ve found yourself another lifeform to harbour—probably spending an  _ awful  _ lot of time with her, aren’t ya?”

He’s not oblivious, not in the slightest; he’s just trying to avoid coming to terms with the thoughts in his head. However, he hadn’t noticed his lack of bonding with the Child and he mentally scolds himself. Of course, the kid wants attention, all kids do, and he’s probably becoming rather frustrated at the inadvertent neglect as a by-product of Mando’s fantasies. 

“I ain’t saying ya shouldn’t indulge a little,” Peli chuckles and wags her hairless eyebrows at the visor, “I don’t blame ya for that. It must be hard adapting to having a girl like that on board your ship.”

Mando quietly sighs under his helmet but a blush lines his cheeks nonetheless. He’s relieved she can’t see it. He grumbles, “Get to the point.”

“Point is, you can’t ignore a child like that,” she explains, “he’s an impish little critter—smart, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did that on purpose to get your attention.”

“He’s costing me a lot of credits for attention.” Black-brown eyes observe the looming figure of beskar and Mando softens slightly. Peli watches with interest and returns the toddler to his arms. “The Girl-”

“She’ll be fine,” she assures, “if she wants to help, I’ll be sure to give her a real workout—don’t worry she won’t be  _ too  _ drained.”

The Mandalorian commits a final leer at the mechanic, enough to cause her to pull her lips tight into a smirk, and he returns to the Girl’s side to exchange his goodbyes, “I’m going to head into town and see if there are any jobs available.” 

The Girl raises an eyebrow in question and pauses polishing the blasters, “I’m not coming with you?”

_ Does she want to come with him?  _ The vocoder emits a hum of thought but ultimately he knows she should stay behind this time, “Peli reckons I should spend time with the kid. Shouldn’t take too long—I’ll just head in and grab the kid a meal, look around for intel… I’ll be back before it’s dark.”

She nods, understanding. “I’ll—just wait here then.”

Mando reciprocates her nod and hesitantly steps back, but the Girl’s fingers loop through his belt and draws him in close to her once again. He steadies himself with a hand on the dip of her waist, digits unconsciously poking into the flesh deeper, and he angles the helmet to her eye level in disarray. 

The familiar weight of his blaster slips into position against his thigh but he doesn’t tear his eyes away to look, he doesn’t want to move at all. “Might need it,” she explains, her tone hushed, “it’s good to go.” She lightly taps the blaster with her free hand and he stiffens when her palm comes to rest atop it, the tips of her fingers brushing against the outside of his thigh.

“Thank you.”

“Of course.” Her lips curl into a cunning grin and she tries to hide it by lifting herself onto her toes and breathing through the fabric surrounding his neck. Mando’s muscles flex involuntarily and the hand on her hip slinks a path to the curve of her back, where he fists a bundle of poncho fabric in his leathers. She whispers, “How’s your back feeling?”

“It’s - it’s better.”

She exhales softly and he  _ swears  _ he can feel it through the cloth, warming his jugular with her gleaming words, “So, you won’t be needing my help tonight?” Mando groans as she weakly pats the lesion deep underneath his cloak—it doesn’t hurt, more or less stings like a Droch crawling through his skin and draining his energy, but that was the Girl’s disposition more so than the wound’s sensitivity. 

“Well,” Mando clears his throat and steps closer—if that’s even possible—so his lower-half is pressing against her waist, evoking a hitch of his own breath from the contact.  _ She’s so soft against him.  _ “I might need a hand…”

She chuckles into his neck, sending the vibrations from her throat into  _ his  _ and it makes a beeline to his heart. It vortexes around the organ, a current so strong it’d be fatal to terminate the stream. Not that he wanted to stop it. It’s such a pleasant feeling, the phantoms of sunshine-esque tendrils applying a pacifying pressure that feels like that of an embrace; warm hands clasping his heart and delivering delicate kisses across the muscle. He can almost sense the cushioning of lips against the pulsing organ.

“Ya know, I’ve got more than just hands.”

“ _ Fuck, _ ” he whispers, practically drooling at the mere suggestion—he’d be so sluggish to drag it out as long as possible, every single touch of his deliberate to commit all her curves, bumps, even bruises, to memory. Store it away for a gloomy day, like a breach in the clouds; sunbeams breaking through the overcast and introducing a warmth like none other. 

Mando cranes his neck to the side slightly and she takes the invite to burrow deeper. The blood in his neck is hot and the air in his helmet sultry. He wants to do nothing but drag her back to the ship and lock themselves away for the remainder of the day, but the irritated child on his hip is starting to get antsy. Mando gasps, “Need to - to take the kid out.”

She hums her sympathy against his neck, “Take your time. I’ll be here.”

Well, time was indeed taken, or however the saying goes.

The Mandalorian had been forced into conversations all day courtesy of the Child; he just couldn’t seem to stop touching things or feeding on display products of each stall they’d pass. Mando’s entire vocabulary had been decreased to continuous  _ sorry _ ’s and  _ kid, no _ ! It doesn’t just end there. The Child was inquisitive of all his surroundings, particularly places Mando couldn’t fit himself—it made for some awkward dialogue between him and the kiosk attendants when he’d be on his hands and knees rummaging around for a loose alien baby.

“ _ I’m not stealing! _ ” He’d reassure but it’d have the opposite effect and turn heads, people eyeing him with curiosity; a Mandalorian, like that in folklore, frantically chasing a little green toddler with something half-alive dangling from its mouth. He’s made a fool out of himself enough for a day. The Child, on the other hand, is still persistent—giving him somewhat of the silent treatment until Mando bargains a promise of food. 

The Child attentively watches his food in the arms of the server, streaks of steam and a tender fragrance wafting in his direction as it settles onto the table ahead. “Thank you,” Mando nods and leans back in his seat, unequipping a small bag of leftover credits he could spare for the day and sliding it across the wooden surface, “do you know of any employment opportunities?”

“Regrettably not, sir,” the waiter replies and exchanges final pleasantries before returning behind the buffet to assist an unruly patron.

Mando sighs and returns his guard to the Child—who grabs a spoonful of scalding liquid and squeals in delight—and chews on the inside of his lip in thought. Tatooine is just as detestable as the last time he was here—the hustle and bustle never-ending. One would think that the Mandalorian could blend in with such an immense and diverse population, but his outright existence drew attention to himself; it’s becoming a ritual each time he steps foot inside a cantina. People’s discussions quickly cease as they scrutinise the warrior upon his entrance, contemplating whether they could neutralize him and pry the beskar steel from his body to sell in the black market. Some have tried and failed, of course. In his youth, Mando thrived off the sensation. It was empowering to have others tremble in their skin at the sheer sight of a Mandalorian, but he’s matured and those days are long since dead. He’s travel-worn, too exhausted to concern himself with people’s thoughts regarding him, so long as they weren’t orchestrating his downfall. 

“I ain’t never seen a thing like this before,” a disembodied voice mutters from behind the Mandalorian, the shoddy cantina lighting casting a shadow across their table. Mando doesn’t tear his attention from the Child but reaches for his blaster nonetheless, the leathers fiddling with the hilt in preparation. “Where’d you get it?”

When he doesn’t reply, the figure shifts to come between him and the Child—a trandoshan with wide-set eyes and sharp pointed teeth, sneering at the man underneath the beskar. She’s got yellow-brown scaly skin and dons a protective piece underneath an unbuttoned shirt, with a hunting rifle across her back and a carbine strapped to her belt. She steals a chair from the closest table and swings it around to join the pair, placing her elbows on the table and looking back-and-forth between Mando and the Child.

“We’re looking to raise a youngling like this, maybe something a lil’ bit more competent than this one.” The Child’s green ears perk up at the stranger but just as quickly dismisses her, plunging the spoon into the womp rat stew for seconds or thirds—Mando wasn’t keeping track. She glances behind Mando and waves a hand and calls, “Bookoo, what d’ya think?”

Bookoo—a Wookiee decked with nothing more than a dual bandolier across his chest and a small satchel at his hip—appears into view, soaring over the accumulated individuals and extends a welcoming smile at Mando underneath the shaggy rug of his face. “Muawa, ur oh.”

“No? What, you think we’re gonna get anything better?”

Mando interrupts, tired of the banter, “He’s not going with you.”

“We have credits,” she taps the satchel on Bookoo’s hip, they clash against one another inside the leather.

“He’s not for sale.” Mando tears himself from his seat and shepherds the Child into his arms, ignoring the burbles and whines he emits as he tries to grab hold of the bowl. Mando turns for the exit, intently listening to the whispers of the pair behind him, but stops when called for.

“Uh-sir... Mandalorian, sir?” He turns on his heels and eyes the waiter who places two small packages stacked together atop the counter. “Your dessert, sir.”

The Trandoshan eyes the Mandalorian as he awkwardly balances the boxes in one arm and the Child in the other. She steps forwards once his hands are far from his blaster to make her claim, “I promised my group I’d bring back an apprentice, ya see? With a lil’ bit of training, that thing should be good to go. Ain’t that right, Bookoo?”

Bookoo steps back defensively, “Mu waa waa.”

“Stupid Wookiee,” she mutters and rises from her stool, her bare feet tapping against the cantina’s duracrete flooring. She places a claw on the counter in an attempt of intimidation, but she only sustains a pathetic reaction from the waiter. “What’s a Mandalorian need a child for anyways? You raising that thing to become one?”

“We’re done talking.”

“Aw, come on. We’re just having a small chat. No need to run for the dunes.”

The Mandalorian denies her the satisfaction of retaliation and continues outside. The familiar crunch of grit a welcoming sound through his filters—he never thought he’d be comforted by such a sound. The Trandoshan yells one last remark before he steers a corner, “If you change your mind, we’ll be here!”

He’s suspicious of their intentions—and uncertain whether they were tailing him—so he weaves through the night crowd, bumping and pushing the drunkards to and fro. Once he’s scampered plenty, and positive they hadn’t been stalking his footsteps, he returns to Peli’s hangar with a drowsy Child and now-cold dessert. Optimally, the kid will be tuckered out for the rest of the night but it was never a certainty—he just hopes he’ll give him some privacy for at least a few hours.

Peli wipes grease on a rag hanging from a belt hoop of her coveralls and offers Mando a smile, “I assume you got yourself a job?”

Mando shakes his head in defeat and delivers one of the takeaway boxes in her hands.

“What’s this?” She opens the box and her eyes practically light up with joy but it’s short-lived as she eyes him suspiciously, “Is this a bribe?”

“Just a nice gesture. I thought.”

“Hmm,” Peli hums and closes the box, nodding her head slightly. “Well, ‘bout that ship of yours… It’ll be two thousand.”

Two thousand. It’ll bleed their funds dry, but the Crest needs repairs. Without them, they’d be stranded here on Tatooine for the unforeseeable future—something Mando  _ really  _ couldn’t accommodate. There’s too much sand. Too many people. His calloused hands aren’t for sitting on; they’re created to work, and he won’t allow himself to leisure around a planet without performing  _ some  _ act. 

The Girl won’t be pleased to hear he’s gone and spent a large sum of her earnings—not to mention how she’ll react when she ultimately comprehends she will be required to stay a little longer than expected. Mando feels his lips curling and he tries to smother it with reasoning; tries to tell himself he can’t keep her detained alongside him forever, but he’s obstinate and doesn’t take heed of his own advice. There’s a leap in his heart and a twisting in his stomach at the thought she’ll remain beside him for a little while longer—at least until he has the credits.

Perhaps the Child was onto something when he went and ripped all those wires out.

“That’s with a discount,” Peli adds.

“I should buy more of those.”

Peli scoffs at his jesting comment and tosses the takeaway parcel atop a flat surface. “The Girl. She’s good with her hands.”

_ If only she knew. _

Something within the mechanic suggests that she does, in fact, know judging by the speculation written across her face; her squinted eyes waltzing his figure and her teeth chomping on the inside of her cheek to avoid voicing a sarcastic comment. The shield of beskar may disrupt his facial expressions—concealing them to only his cognisance—but his mannerisms are increasingly heightened to others and he’s gradually realising he’s not as proficient in masking them as he originally thought. 

Mando swallows a thick lump in his throat and shifts his weight to one foot, his hip cocking out vaguely. “Is the maintenance finished?” he asks, shifting the topic to something he can reduce the awkwardness with.

Peli clicks her tongue and rolls her eyes, “Oh, you mean the replacement of the  _ entire  _ navigational controls? Yeah, did it all by myself in a matter of a few hours. No help from my droids. No, it’s not done! Do you know anything about spacecraft restoration?”

“I typically leave that in the hands of...professionals.” Mando chooses carefully. “When will it be ready?”

“Me and your Girl are done for the night.”

_ His Girl? _

Mando’s cheeks flush mildly, a faint tint of pink lining across his nose accompanied by a heat tackling the inside of his visor. Those two little words sound exceptional as the settle surrounding him, fogging his head with the seven letters—seven letters that he couldn’t relate to. They don’t belong to him; wouldn’t belong to him.

But he lets himself fantasise they could— _ they are. _

_ His Girl.  _

Mando’s lips ghost underneath the beskar, mouthing the words to himself as though to test the waters; dipping his toes in the substance and sampling the texture before sinking into it, letting it engulf him. He thinks of His Girl’s lips and how soft, how  _ gentle, _ they looked. Her lips are the sandy borders of a beach—sand he wouldn’t mind if it were to wedge its way through his flight suit to abuse his body— and her tongue, her saliva, are the waters; refreshing but salty, leaving him thirsty for more.

Peli drags him out of his daydreaming without realising it, “But it should be up and running before the suns’ at its peaks. So you better have my credits ready! I’m not free labour, ya know.”

“Don’t worry,” he groans, “you’ll get the payment.”

She crosses her arms taut over her chest and squints at him suspiciously, probably wondering how he’s going to manage to pay her, but her determination fades into moderate compassion with a deep exhale. “All right, gimme the kid.”

“What? Why?”

Her earthy eyes flick up to the cockpit’s viewport and Mando twists his body to observe. The top of the Girl’s head can be seen from his perspective, her arms raised high above her in a stretch and then just as quickly disappears out of sight. Peli teasingly shoves Mando’s shoulder and laughs, “Go on, I’ll take the kid for the night. I’ll even do it for free; reimbursement for the dessert.”

She’s a blessing in disguise—who’s he to decline such a persuasive offer? 

“Just-” Peli stabilises the weight in her arms, the Child placidly dozing off in one, “I better not be hearing  _ all that _ , okay? If you wake either me or the kid up-”

“Thank you.”

She watches him, stunned, and then shakes her head and mutters something under her breath. Mando doesn’t even feel tempted to know what she’s whispering to herself, he only has one thought on his mind: His Girl.

The Mandalorian reunites with the Girl in the cockpit’s cabin. She’s sitting on the floor tinkering with loose cabling with a craned neck to accommodate for the low-rise control board. Mando’s unsure whether he’s delighted to see her down there or disappointed; something within him expecting her to be somewhere less uncomfortable, awaiting his return—it’s a selfish thought and a  _ very  _ hormonal one at that. He sighs to himself and sits in the passenger’s seat, his elbows leaning on his knees to peer over her shoulder. “I thought Peli said you were finished?” Mando queries.

“She’s finished. I’m not.”

Mando breathes her name, introducing it to the cramped cockpit and it’s stale air, and she pauses a moment to turn her head and look into the magnetising visor. Now he’s the one pausing. It’s comical how he’s so easily conquered by a single glance. She doesn’t look at him like that in holoplays—where her eyes gleam in the low light hanging above and her mouth twitches when she’s restraining a smile—so why does his heart flutter and his blood surge through his veins? Rather, her eyebrows are crinkled with discouragement on account of uncooperative cords and there’s a streak of oil across her forehead—she looks just as gorgeous as ever. 

Mando’s voice softens as he talks to her, “Take a break. It can wait until morning.”

She dismisses his recommendation, “It’s fine, I can keep going.”

“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

“Quoting me to myself now, are we?” 

He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re persuasive.” She chuckles some and he delves into the rumbles, enveloping himself in the bubbliness of it. “I brought food. You can have some if you stop working.”

She quirks an eyebrow and eyes the package in his leathers. “What is it?”

“Come here and look.”

“Are you having some?”

Mando contemplates, but he already knows his answer. “I’m not hungry,” he lies.

“Neither am I.” She deceitfully smiles and returns to her labours—it’s arduous, her fingers firmly twining the wires together and unravelling others apart to reconnect to a bundle loosely hanging underneath the panel.

The Mandalorian had completely forgotten how stubborn she can be, especially with his thoughts distorted by the events of last night; she had been so adaptable and willing to aid him. It’s ridiculous to think they’re the same person. Jaw clenching with defeat, Mando sighs heavily and fiddles with the takeaway box. It’s lid lifts from its fastenings to expose a small stack of fluffy cobalt-coloured pancakes. They’re slightly soggy from the absorbed condiments and stone-cold, having been outside for far too long, but they’re a Tatooine delicacy he had yet to try before. 

Mando glances at the Girl and rips the pancake into sections, simultaneously watching her exhaust herself. She groans dramatically and readjusts her position, practically laying on her stomach with her torso hoisted by her elbows. It allows for her to maneuver underneath the control panels—and allows Mando to drag his eyes  _ lower.  _

His leathers slide underneath the bottom of his helm and dislodge it from position, the beskar expelling a sharp hiss of air. He freezes at the reminder but the Girl doesn’t seem interested in the newly discovered noise; he continues, elevating the hindrance just above his mouth to slot in a slice of torn pancake.

They’re soft like her hands and he lets himself imagine  _ they are _ —pretends the sweetness of the syrup is actually his cum on her fingers  _ or,  _ better yet, her own slick. He’s reluctant to even  _ chew,  _ not wanting to shred the impure fantasy he’s created upon himself, so he doesn’t. Mando sits there with the pancake in his mouth just holding it there, letting his tongue flatten underneath it and suck the syrup out to relish in the bittersweetness. 

It’s only once he’s drained it of its flavour that he finally devours the cake in hunger. It’d been a while since he last ate, but he repeats the process with the other sections he had torn apart—struggling to contain his self-control as he savours the sweetness and imagery of the Girl writhing underneath him. 

Mando plops the tips of his leathers in his mouth and absorbs the residual syrup before aligning his helmet in place yet again, his hunger reasonably quenched—his thirst for the Girl, not so much. It doesn’t help matters when she reaches for a cord and her poncho rides up, unmasking the curves of her backside and revealing a splinters-worth of skin above the hem of her pants. He indulges at the sight of taunting skin and licks a drop of syrup from his lips, imagining his head between her thighs lapping at something sweeter— _ tangier.  _ Mando feels so fucking undignified around her like his honour has been squeezed out of an over-absorbed rag; dripping through the gaps in his fingers and there’s nothing he can do to catch it before it vaporises before his eyes hardly leaving a trace in its wake.

It’s wholly improper how his eyes attack her unclothed skin, obsessing over it like a glass of water in the outskirts of Tatooine. Now that he thinks about it, his mouth is significantly parched and he’s forced to bite his lip to avoid reaching out for the temptation. Still, he hungers to run his fingers across the bare flesh and explore her bumps and curves with his tongue, dragging it over her neck and feel the rumbles of her moans as he sucked on a pulsing vein.  _ Her moans _ —what a magnificent sound that must be.

The unspoken promise between them plays with the dark crevices of his imagination.

_ I’ve got more than hands. _

Mando’s unsure if she meant it; she hadn’t indicated anything to him since his return. Is she expecting him to make the first move? If so, that’s torturous in itself.

Coffee-coloured eyes battle against the azure cakes and he confronts a moral dilemma. He has an inclination to satisfy the building arousal in his pants but it doesn’t align with his traitorous voice, “Eat.”

The Girl glances over her shoulder and  _ Lord _ , he could get used to that view especially with him atop of her. She reverts her gaze to the opened box in his lap. “I’m not-”

“I’ve had one,” he confesses and tilts the box to show a stack of three remainders, “two each, but you can have my other.”

“When did you… Did you take off your helmet? In front of me?”

“Behind you,” he corrects.

She doesn’t find the humour in the situation, though, which surprises Mando. “What - what about your Creed? Fuck, Mando. You can’t…”

His expression softens underneath the visor and he sinks to his knees on the ground so he’s eye-level with the Girl, clasping one of her hands in his leathers. “Don’t concern yourself with that. I didn’t remove it entirely, just enough to eat. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Not that big of a deal? Mando-”

Mando impolitely interrupts her by pushing a torn slab of blue through her parted lips—his digits lingering longer than necessary—and he chuckles at her shocked grimace. 

She swallows and slaps his pauldron, “Rude!”

“Sit down and eat.” 

The Girl conforms to his invitation and settles beside him, her back firmly planted against the durasteel wall of the cockpit. Mando awkwardly lowers to sit as well, the beskar clanking against the wall behind them but he doesn’t take any notice of it. It’d be like herding a group of Nexu—utterly impossible—if he tried to concentrate on anything but her thigh against his or her hand digging through the box on his lap. 

She munches on a blue cake beside him and it takes everything in him to give her privacy and not drool over the sticky syrup running down her fingers. It’s like she can read him though, her unsoiled hand hooking two fingers on the underside of the helmet and dragging it to look at her. “What about you?”

“I’ve...had one.” 

“One. I don’t want you passing out on me. Here, I’ll look away.” 

Mando eyes the divided dessert between her fingers and the drop of golden syrup slowly making way to her third knuckle. She’s not looking at him and can’t identify whether he’s accepting her offer or not, but she doesn’t dare retract her hand; it just hovers in the air waiting for his leathers to grasp the food from her—they don’t. Something so much softer  _ does _ , though.

Mando licks a long stripe along the underside of her fingers, tearing the pancake from her clutch with his tongue and reserving it in the cheek of his mouth for later—too preoccupied with the sugary concentrate coating her fingers. She tenses at the sensations. It’s overwhelming, consuming her thoughts and spitting them out in a pile of goo. It’s almost irresistible to not look at him, to not watch as he sucks on her fingers so fucking desperately, but she’s respectful of his Creed even if it kills her.

“Mando,” she whispers because it’s too quiet, too real. 

His tongue is persistent, parting her fingers from each other and lapping at the syrup in the crevices of her knuckles. It’s so sweet and he moans around her fingers at the taste on the back of his tongue. Mando doesn’t concern himself with the potential of humiliation—he ought to look downright laughable right now—because she’s so sweet and soft in his mouth, far superior to the pancake he relished earlier. There’s a puny attempt to pull away on her behalf but with a firm grip on her wrist, she holds her position inside his mouth, especially when his teeth lock her digits in place, while her other hand finds the plate of thigh armour and hooks the fingers underneath.

“ _ Shit, _ ” she breathes and leans into him.

The Girl’s palm flattens against his chin and he stiffens his jaw, his movements slacking behind now that he’s focused on the warmth on his face. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched him so tenderly, no - he  _ could  _ but he didn’t want to; didn’t want to ruin the moment with the imagery of blaster fire and his mother’s last loving touch.

Her reassuring strokes against his cheeks with her free fingers urge him on and he sucked the final of the syrup from her digits before freeing them from his lips, placing a peck on the tips. Once the helmet is resealed, he finishes the neglected pancake in his mouth.

“You’re not as reserved as you act,” she chuckles, “where was that last night?”

Mando smiles. “Come here and let me show you.”

Where was all this confidence coming from?

He doesn’t care—he’s making a fucking move while he can.

The Girl contemplates him with a raised brow and a small smirk toying at her lips. It makes him want to know what she’s thinking—formulating—in that head of hers, but he’s not left in suspense for long. She braces a leg over his lap and straddles him, constricting her inner thighs against the outside of his and tilting his helmet back to look up at her. 

Mando nearly stops breathing, his organs refusing to cooperate in unison with such an unknown weight atop of him. All that confidence from earlier completely obliterates with just one roll of her hips—maybe it wasn’t confidence but arrogance, he thinks. She’s devious, he can see the pleasure in her eyes at his unfolding below her.

“Are you looking at me?” she asks, a hand on either side of his helmet to steady his head.

He nods because he doesn’t trust himself  _ not  _ to whine if he opens his mouth.

She looks back at him and for a moment, just a second, he feels as though she can  _ see  _ him, and then she grinds down and sketches the outline of his stiffening cock below her heat—and  _ fuck  _ if it isn’t one of the friskiest things he’s ever beared witness to. There’s just something so unique about the eye contact when she’s unravelling him like a ball of yarn; he wants to gaze into her eyes without the guard ahead of him and break  _ her  _ apart. “F-fuck, you’re,”-she rolls her hips again, faster-“ _ ah,  _ you’re too - too good to me.”

“I know,” she quips.

Daunting. It’s so fucking daunting being so paralysed with arousal underneath the Girl, stripped down to an accumulated pile of whimpers and twitches as she takes her sweet time tormenting him— _ and he fucking enjoys every second of it.  _ He’s fatigued from years of bounty hunting, years of being shot, stabbed, beaten, and it’s stimulating having somebody touch him so languidly and voluntarily care for him in such a way.

“Tell me what you want, Mando.”

He swallows.

It’s so fucking ironic. He’s never had more than a few thousand credits to his name at a time and yet, pinned below the Girl with her being so provocative, he feels like the richest man alive—because it couldn’t be luck; he’d never been so fortunate to as receiving a simple bounty commission, a beautiful girl extracting every drop of arousal out of him no less.

He moans her name and inches his fingers under her poncho, “Want -  _ fuck,  _ I need-”

Mando’s pleas are interrupted by a suspiciously familiar disembodied voice shouting, “Come on out and nobody gets hurt!” It’s a gruff, hoarse sound that oils the cogs in his mind.  _ The Trandoshan.  _ She must’ve followed him here…but he took precautions…

He can’t find it within himself to tear his hands away from the Girl to survey the threat outside, so she takes it upon herself to clamber off his lap leaving him cold and hard in his pants. Molten lava rises in his chest as he raises to his feet, staring out the viewport with such vengeance it almost surprises him. The Trandoshan firmly stands with Peli Motto beside her, the barrel of her carbine pressed against her temple, and the Child squirming in her adjacent limb.

“Shit!” he growls and slams a pair of closed fists against the nav controls. It whines upon impact and blips a malfunctioning screen at his outburst.

“Hey, calm down,” she soothes, a hand slipping into his.

“They have Peli! ...The kid.”

The Trandoshan leers at him through the viewport. “Leave that blaster of yours on the ship and get down ‘ere. No funny business either! I’ll fire a hole through her head otherwise. Then the Kid’s.” She accentuates her point by thrusting the barrel against Peli’s temple harder.

The Girl fishes his blaster out of his holster. “They haven’t seen me,” she explains. “I’ll wait until you get close enough to them but don’t try anything without me.”

It could work. It could fail. He didn’t have an alternative plan.

“Okay,” he agrees, understanding the moment between them is long gone.

With one final gawp outside, Mando pries himself away from the nav controls and heads downstairs, bare. It’s not as though he’s completely defenceless; the flamethrower in his vambraces had enough fuel to get him out of a pinch, the whipcord could serve a purpose if essential, and he still possessed his vibro-knife in his boot. None of that can compare to the comfort of a blaster in his hand though.

The Child and Peli Motto’s safety is his priority, so he’ll comply with the Girl’s strategy and get as close to the Trandoshan as possible. He’ll use brute force if necessary.

They’ve relocated to an open region in the hangar where it’ll be near impossible to shield everybody if a blaster fight ensues. Preferably, it won’t come to that. The Trandoshan flexes her finger against the trigger when Peli fidgets with her hands beside her. Mando vaguely shakes his head in her direction and examines the Child’s wellbeing in the yellow-brown scaly arms.

“I’m here.” He raises his hands to demonstrate his compliance, “Let them go and we’ll talk.”

She sneers at him,  _ laughs _ . “No.” The blaster reels back and whips Peli over the head, knocking her unconscious in a piled heap on the ground. Mando moves forwards, his fists tightening with each step. “Hold it right there.” The Child whines against the cold barrel pressing into his wrinkled forehead. Mando stops hastily, his eyebrows twitching with rage.

“What do you want?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“What do you need a child for?”

She smiles hauntingly, her sharp teeth locking together through her open-mouthed grin. “We don’t need one, but this one’s got a pricey bounty on its head,”—she aims for the flesh above his heart plate—“as do you.”

Guild members. Just his luck they’d be situated on Tatooine at the same time as he is.

The Mandalorian’s visor tilts to the Child in her arms, his eyes narrowing on the outstretched green claw. The kid’s eyes shut and his forehead wrinkles as he desperately tries to concentrate on something, and then it clicks in Mando’s head. His powers. The Child hadn’t used them since they took down the Mudhorn and Mando was beginning to think they had vanished, but they mustn’t have—he’s too focused on the air ahead of him.

The Trandoshan hasn’t noticed his fidgeting and Mando takes it upon himself to keep the barrel focused on him by stepping forwards, providing the Child time to figure out his abilities. “You won’t leave here alive,” he taunts.

She seems unfazed by his remarks, too confident in her plans. “Ah, what do we have here?” The Trandoshan asks curiously, peering over the Mandalorian’s figure and he whips his head to follow. The Girl is subdued in the arms of the acquainted Bookoo, who must’ve been anticipating resistance and remained obscured from their sight. 

The Girl fights against his grip but he’s far too strong for her to overpower and she limps in defeat, glancing up behind her at the Wookiee; eyes enlarging and her mouth falling agape underneath the face-covering she donned for the occasion.

Then—the last thing the Mandalorian expects to hear—the Trandoshan exclaims her name in a greeting, “It’s been a while!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "muawa, ur oh" - no, thank you  
> "mu waa waa" - please leave me alone
> 
> Oooooh cliffhanger yay! Happy Friday folks, enjoy the finale of WandaVision tonight!


	9. Deceit

Nevarro’s lava rivers would look like measly miserable puddles of rainfall besides the Mandalorian nowadays. To say he’s displeased with the current conditions he’s been forcibly immersed into was the understatement of the century. He’s more unimpressed and frustrated than concerned for his safety, but his personal security is irrelevant when the Child’s life is endangered. Both the Child and the Girl were a few metres ahead of Mando, accompanied by the dastardly Trandoshan gambling with a conductor that generates a surge of charged bolts through the Girl’s cuffs plastered around her wrists. She tries to smother the pain—not let them get the gratification out of her agony—but he can see it in her footsteps that she’s exhausted and barely supporting her weight.

The Trandoshan is conversing with her, he can see their jaws moving but he’s out of earshot and with Bookoo’s constant supervision he doesn’t gain a chance to activate his sonic detectors to listen in. Mando risks a glance behind him at the Wookiee, eyeing the identical conductor loosely held in his furry claw. He hadn’t pressed it a single time in this entire trek, yet the Trandoshan had been constantly mashing the buttons on hers.

The Mandalorian feels useless, like a discarded rag heavy with oil and burdens, and he lets his brain nitpick the small details he’d been granted. Their affiliation with the Girl, for instance, was implied they have history but Mando is still uncertain to what extent or where they currently stand—all though, the brutal electrocuting gave him a rough estimate. 

_ I trusted the wrong people _ , that’s what she had said back on the Crest. It had to be them. The Trandoshan is too invested in the Girl for it not to be. Magma flows through his veins in substitute to his blood, hotter and thicker than ever before and he scrunches his fists closed behind his back in lieu of striking the reptilian. They were the ones who caused those injuries to her arms.  _ They were the ones who induced all that pain on her. _ It makes his fingers twitch with anger like they yearn to squeeze the trigger of his Amban rifle, pulverise them into the worthless dust they were.

“Mandalorian,” the Trandoshan calls, waving a claw for him to proceed, “come ‘ere, will ya?”

He abides by her commands, not because he needs to but because it’ll allow him to get in between her and his crewmates. She has other plans, turning with an aimed barrel once he’s close enough for comfort. “Not so close there, buddy. Okay-” she glances back at the Girl, “you gonna obey now or do I have to shoot him?”

The Girl remains silent with her back facing Mando but her hands are shaking and her breathing staggered.

“We don’t need him alive for the reward, ya know. I’ll kill him.”

She resolves, “Stop! Leave him alone. I’ll do it, all right?”

Mando stands voiceless, piecing together what little fragments of the conversation he could but it’s futile. There’s no way to know what they’re referring to without arousing suspicion. So he remains mute and doesn’t make noise when he walks to not draw attention to himself, maintaining a secure distance that helps ease his nerves some—he’s closer to his companions and it’ll come in handy if he finds a pause in their concentration.

The Trandoshan is smarter than she looks, though, and senses the Mandalorian’s prying. She’s quiet for the remainder of the walk and only utters a small  _ ‘welcome home!’  _ upon boarding their spacecraft. It’s double the size of the Razor Crest and stocked with thrice as many turrets. It’s definitely not a craft he’d want to go head-to-head with, but it’s bulky whereas his Crest was nimble and easily manipulated. The Crest would reign as the victor, he believes. 

Bookoo leads the way to the common rooms as the Trandoshan seals the craft’s hatch, the durasteel walls a blockade from returning to Tatooine. There’s an additional two Guild members inside the parlour playing a game of holochess, a Devaronian with dark red skin and large horns protruding from his forehead—much alike Burg’s, only he’s much scrawnier in comparison—and a human, one with a bland appearance that Mando hardly bats an eye at him. 

The Devaronian raises his eyes to stalk Mando and snarls, “That him? Doesn’t look the same.”

“It’s him, just fancier armour.” the Trandoshan replies.

Mando juggles his vision back and forth between the two— _ fancier armour.  _ They must’ve met him before he donned his beskar, but he can’t familiarise himself with their faces. The Trandoshan and Wookiee hadn’t jogged his memory earlier, he hadn't met them before, and the human was a waste of effort to even attempt to remember such a plain face. It only leaves the Devaronian, but that’s a dead end as well. Mando would remember  _ that  _ face—he’s remarkably different to others of his species, at least from what he’s seen among Burg and his lackeys.

“How do you know it’s him?” 

She sneers at her crewmate, “Don’t trust me, Kur?”

Kur—Mando assumes—rises from the game of holochess and shoves her shoulder aggressively to thrust her out of his space. “I remember the last time I trusted you, Tika, things didn’t go down well. Shouldn’t we take his helmet off to check it’s the right one?”

The Girl hurls herself ahead of Mando protectively and urges him backwards by leaning against him. “Fucking try it and I’ll kill you,” she growls. It’s a sweet gesture—a recurrence with the Girl as of late and it makes his chest flutter—but if they’re persistent enough, there’s not much he can do to avoid it with both hands behind his back. Don’t get him wrong, he’ll put up a fight and make them live to regret it but ultimately he can’t fend off all four of them at once. On the contrary, they aren’t the most unified of partners; something Mando could potentially use to his advantage and, if not for Bookoo’s interruptions, perhaps he would’ve attempted something then and there.

“Grrraooowww gruhhh!” 

“It’s not as though we have the knowledge of his identity anyways,” the human speaks. “He’s Mandalorian; nobody. They’ll know if it’s him just by looking at the steel. That’s all he is.”

Mando scoffs underneath his beskar, though the human voices the truth and even he knows that. It’s been a long while since anybody’s seen his face. If he were to die here on this ship and be stripped of his beskar, nobody would know who he was—not even the Girl; and  _ that  _ maims his heart.

The group falls into silence at the human’s statement weighing the options over in those thick heads of theirs, and the Girl slacks the tension in her shoulders, his Creed seemingly safe for now. “All right,” Kur sighs to fill the vacancy. “What’s up with this one?”

Mando follows the maroon finger dangling ahead of the Child in Tika’s arms—comatose in the arms of an enemy. The Mandalorian couldn’t do anything to verify his vitals and overcome those darkened thoughts in his head, and it makes him feel utterly forlorn.  _ He  _ was supposed to protect the Child and yet, back at the Hangar, the Child was the one who had tried to protect  _ him _ ; his arm outstretched, feeling through the air for something ahead only he could sense, but something went wrong along the line. The Child had fallen unconscious within a blink of the eye and he’s been motionless ever since.

“Dunno.” Tika shrugs her shoulders nonchalantly. “I was a little preoccupied with our unexpected guest.”

The Human steps forward, sticky fingers robbing the Trandoshan of the conductor, and straightens in front of the Girl with a twisted smile. He laughs, “Didn’t think I’d have to see your face again. Thought Arvala-7 would’ve taken care of you.”

“Guess you were wrong,” The Girl taunts, “not much has changed I see.”

He doesn’t like that, not one bit. The inner knuckle of his thumb digs into the switch and she shudders at the electricity coursing through her, her fists clenched behind her and her head bowed. Mando strides in front of her in two steps and slams the crest of his helmet into his skull, effectively knocking the conductor out of his hands and onto the floor where he strikes it with the heel of his boot. 

“You son of a-” He grasps his bleeding forehead and stumbles away from the pair. Tika and Kur quietly laugh behind his back. “You’re protecting her?! She was going to kill you!”

The Mandalorian pauses, head tilted and glances behind him to a very guilty-looking girl. She wouldn’t even lift her head to look at him, just kept her eyes on the ground and her shoulders hunched as though she’s trying to hide from his investigative staring. “What are they talking about?” he asks.

“It’s - it was a bounty,” she murmurs, her voice soft  _ and scared.  _

His eyes are desperately searching for any sparkle of reassurance in hers, but he doesn’t find it. She’s ashamed, trying to escape his confused and curious questioning. A bounty— _ oh no.  _

“The kid.”

She nods and chews on her bottom lip anxiously. “I didn’t - didn’t know it was a kid, Mando. I promise.” Her eyes finally raise to look through the visor and he wishes they hadn’t; wishes she shied away from him because maybe then he could process the information. “I thought you were the bounty. Figured you were some no-good pest like all the others I’d taken down but I saw you with the kid. You - you were gentle with him, kind; not the traits of scum.”

“You were following me?” 

“They - they wanted me to take the shot. I withheld as long as I could until you repaired the Crest and left. I wasn’t going to shoot you, Mando. I wouldn’t.”

This is all too overwhelming for the Mandalorian; his thoughts and rationality smothered by the registering confession to the brink of a headache pounding against the front of his brain and backs of his eyes. 

Tika spits, “This kid of yours was gonna be our one-way ticket to a life of luxury. Could’ve taken out that encampment and been out of there long before you showed up, but  _ she  _ didn’t like the risks and wanted to wait it out. Let somebody else deal with the Nikto’s and we’ll lick up their leftovers. It all worked out in the end, though, I guess.”

“Now we got two bounties,” Kur interjects.

Mando’s not addressing their boasting. How could he when he’s struggling to make sense of the words being flung at him? They’re in a messy pile on the ground, disorganised and tangled together, and the restraints are stopping him from reaching out and reconstructing them into a formulated sentence. Not that he could with the disorienting throbbing in his ears.

The Girl’s eyes seek refuge in the soft of his flight suit to avoid the grim cold tint of a visor. “Mando, I’m-”

Tika interrupts her before she can mutter another word, “Let’s get out of here and claim our rewards, shall we? Kur, take our old friend here to the controls, will ya? If she doesn’t want to repair them, we have a bargaining chip here.” She smirks at Mando. “Bookoo, you take the Mandalorian to his room.”

Bookoo grunts a reply and maneuvers to the exit, waiting for Mando to follow.

“The Child stays with me,” he says.

“Not anymore he doesn’t. Get moving.” Tika nods her head towards Bookoo. 

Reluctantly, he complies. It won’t do the Child any good if he dies right here and now. He gambles a last glance back at the Girl, his heart dropping when she looks at him through glassy eyes before he rounds a corner uncertain whether he’ll see her again.

The Mandalorian investigates the room he had been manhandled into. Alone, might he add, as they had split the trio down separate hallways. He’d been pushed and prodded with a blaster’s barrel against his neck down a corridor alongside Bookoo and the human, abruptly forcing him inside a small compartment that rendered more or less as a janitor's closet. It wasn’t utilised for anything, judging by the ransacked shelving units lining the walls and there’s hardly enough space for him to breathe let alone discover a hidden exit. For such a sizable spacecraft, one would think they’d have another room to withhold him; a cell unit, perhaps. It’s a  _ large  _ craft for only four individuals, formerly five.

The Girl. She’s one of them. One of the people who intended to cash in the Child for a pricey reward. It makes his blood boil and his jaw clench just thinking about it—thinking about the Girl haphazardly handing the Child over to the Client after he put his trust in her.

_ He trusted her. _

It’s not something he can say about anybody else—not to this extent—and this was exactly why.

The closet door slides upwards and Tika supports her weight against the frame, the Child no longer in her arms. “Where is he? What did you do with him?” he asks, spitting venom at his visor.

“He’s fine.” She waves him off and reaches behind out of his vision. “Figured you should talk. It’ll be your last opportunity.” Tika’s claws are digging into the Girl’s arms—her  _ bare  _ arms. They’re riddled with slashes, bruises, cuts, grazes; you name it, she’s got it. Some are nothing more than faint lines of bumps, a reminder of what happened to her, but others are fresh. There’s a particular one, running from her bicep to the outside of her shoulder, that’s just gushing out crimson like a leaky faucet. It trails down her arm and to her hands behind her, dripping from her shaking fingertips.

Tika pushes her inside the room but abruptly pulls her back, the Girl like a ragdoll in her claws, and she rummages behind her once more to clasp the Girl’s face mask in her opposite claw. “You don’t deserve this, you know. She was the best of us and she’s dead because of  _ you _ ,” Tika hisses in her face and thrusts the mask against the doorframe, crumbling it into minuscule fragments that accumulated on the ground; lost. The Girl stares at the shattered pieces in disbelief but she doesn’t have time to mourn her loss as Tika shoves her inside.

The Girl collapses into Mando with a thud and the blood smears across the steel plating of his chest, she hisses in pain and retreats. Despite the wrath bubbling inside him, pleading not to crumble at the sight of the Girl beaten and bloody, and the prickling of anguish against his heart upon the revelation that he’d been  _ lied to,  _ he can’t resist stepping a little closer to soothe her from the agony. It has the opposite effect and she flinches away, tripping over her own feet clumsily but she’s back on them hastily withdrawing from his looming figure.

“If things go bad, you’ll be cleaning up the blood. That being said, we won’t be needing her anymore.” Tika jabs, before locking the door once again. 

They’re expecting him to kill her; they’ve set their hearts on it. Probably don’t want to dirty their own hands.

Mando stands tall, silent, and nightmarish above her. He’s nothing more than an outline of cold beskar in her vision, and it terrifies her—he can see it in her eyes, the same deep fearful gaze that resembled all of his prior victim’s seconds before their demise. If it wasn’t such a broken and twisted circumstance he could laugh at her expression; the Girl who's too sarcastic for her own good suddenly so petrified in front of the man she’d seen so vulnerable on the account of  _ her  _ sensual touches. There’s something undisturbed in his core reminding him this was  _ the Girl  _ and he needn’t intimidate her in such a way, but there’s something even darker looming in its occupancy recounting the confession and how she’s kept disreputable secrets from him. 

The Mandalorian just glares at her, confused with a growing bitterness lacing the front of his tongue. He can’t decipher why he felt so enraged. She had let him leave unscathed, he was literally living proof of that—but she hadn’t informed him of this; never even hinted that she came so close to ending his life on Arvala-7. It’s enough to make his fingernails dig into the leather and his muscles tense to where he looks even bulkier, more intimidating. She detects his evolved stance, her eyes are soft, elusive,  _ scared.  _

“I’m sor-ry,” she chokes, her throat hoarse and rough. “I should have told you. I-I was going to tell you.”

“You lied to me.” The modulator utters the words with no emotion; just states a fact. “I trusted you.”

The Girl fidgets with her hands, rubbing the stickiness of her blood between her fingers to remain grounded. “It’s - I didn’t shoot you. I didn’t even have my finger on the trigger. I promise, Mando, please.”

“I felt sympathy for you. I took you in. I let you sleep in the same room as me. As the Child. The Child you were happy to give up for some credits.”

“I wasn’t going to take the kid, I told you that already.” She’s becoming agitated now, her eyebrow crinkled as she returns the provoked expression he’s currently giving her underneath the tint of his visor. She’s never been one to enjoy being accused of something. “It’s not like you can talk, you know. Where’d you get all that beskar from? Sure as hell didn’t have it back on Arvala-7.”

_ That  _ strikes a chord. A slack, untuned chord on his metaphorical harp—it’s low-pitched and dull in his ears; so displeasing to listen to that he wants to shred the flimsy string until there’s nothing left to produce such an awful tune.  _ He was once a threat to the Child; just as much as the Girl had been.  _

The Child was nothing more than a bounty, a commission to distract himself from lightless thoughts and life of solitary, just like the hundreds before him. The Mandalorian was so close to leaving Nevarro with a fresh cuirass and a stack of credits in his pocket; a dense consciousness to accompany the weight of beskar steel on his body. But he’d seen something in the kid—innocence and compassion, mostly, but something else he still hadn’t grasped.

He can’t help but wonder if the Girl had seen it too. Whereas he saw it in person, albeit behind a visor, she watched their relationship bloom through the scope of a rifle. Peculiar how they both witnessed such humanity through the barrier of a lens.

Perhaps that’s why she didn’t shoot.

She resolves, “I’m sorry. You don’t have to trust me, I don’t expect you to. Just let me help you, please, let me get you to the kid.”

“How?”

“The restraints. They gave you a faulty pair, I can get them off.”

Mando doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction, but the Child is the top priority and it’s not as though he has other options. He turns to face his back towards her, indicating his approval, and she inches towards him until their fingers brush together and their backs press. If she wants to contribute by liberating his wrists, he’ll let her—one last time.

He doesn’t pressure her with questions, no matter how much he seeks answers. It won’t do any good if she can’t concentrate on removing the shackles. Rather, he focuses on her digits cautiously caressing the outside of his wrists underneath the thick of his leather and her bare elbows nudging against his back and arms. The touches are so careful, so uncertain, whereas they had been courageous beforehand; desire and need replaced by trembling. It only prompts his anger to increase—targeting the back of his brain in waves of assault—but it’s more towards himself than her. Regardless of what he tells himself, she still has a substantial hold over him. She can make his heart jolt and pick up its pace with just a few simple strokes of her fingers against his armour.

Her fingers trail along the steel and fiddle with the restraint’s bearings. Mando tightens and locks his jaw, battling a mental conflict between wanting to despise her and wanting to-... _ something _ . He doesn’t know  _ what  _ he wants but he knows what he  _ should  _ want and that’s enough for him to latch onto—to bury his selfish desires with morals.

“There,” she exclaims and unclasps the cuffs from his wrists.

His fists return to his sides, and now that he’s capable of manipulating his vibro-knife, he formulates a blueprint of escape though there’s nothing to go on. Tika had locked the only exit and there’s no override panel from inside, meaning he’ll need someone on the outside to manually unlock it and he doubts that’ll happen. 

The Girl backs away from Mando, her wrists still confined in her own restraints. She daren’t request his assistance to eliminate the bruising durasteel, even if they were leaving marks on her skin and beginning to restrict her blood flow. 

She’s growing tired watching him glance around the room aimlessly and pipes up, “Bookoo could help you.”

Mando scoffs, “One of your teammates? No thanks.”

She sighs. “He’s trusting and I’ve made a decent impression on him. He didn’t zap you, did he? Bookoo was the only one who didn’t want to leave me.”

“Doesn’t mean he’ll help me escape.”

“Call for him.” She nods her head towards the door and he follows, eyeing the patch of brown fur through the slits. Even if he was trusting, he’s an enemy. Surely he wouldn’t willingly aid the Mandalorian in escaping. “Tell him I need medical supplies or something. Don’t - don’t kill him. He’s not like the others.”

It’s the only strategy available. He just hopes the Wookiee is as naive as she makes him out to be. Mando eyes the Girl with a solid leer as he walks to the door and retrieves the guard’s attention. “Hey...Bookoo? Bookoo, I need your help,” he acts panicked, putting on the best performance he can achieve. It must be reasonably believable as Bookoo faces Mando and tries to peer through the room, but the Girl has shuffled out of his sight. “She’s injured, please. Please, she’s one of you.”

Ouch—the Girl bites the insides of her cheeks and struggles not to let it get to her, but the damage is already done; he’s saying it to rub salt in Bookoo’s fragile gullibility of a wound, but she knows there’s a part of him that means those words, a part of him that sincerely believe those words, and that hurts more than the slashes across her arms.

“Ohh haa,” Bookoo responds, agreeing to the Mandalorian’s counterfeit distress, and unseals the lockage system to aid the Girl. 

Mando is patient, one of his better traits, as the Wookiee enters the room and he doesn’t lay a hand on him until he’s got his back facing him, then he’s on him faster than Bookoo can comprehend; beskar-covered arms wrapping around the thick of his furry neck and squeezing to restrict his blood flow, but the Wookiee resists his attacks and backs into the wall behind them. Mando groans out of pain as he’s constricted between durasteel and Bookoo, his hold around his neck never ceasing. 

The Girl propels herself from across the room, she’s hasty on her feet—he’d forgotten how smooth her movements could be, ramifications of being on the Crest all the time—and comes to stand ahead of the tussling pair, raised on her toes facing away from them. There are a few clinks and Mando glances down to see his abandoned restraints tightened around one of his paws, but the Girl can’t manage to constrict his other before he flings her across the room, the heap of her body producing a loud crash as she falls to the floor below her.

Mando kicks out one of Bookoo’s legs beneath him and shoves the weight off himself, leathers grabbing hold of the chain and interlocking the adjacent cuff around the shelving unit bolted to the wall beside them. The Wookiee growls with wrath, tugging on the steel harshly but it’s remaining solid; for now. There’s no doubt in his brain that Bookoo will rid himself of the restraints and Mando doesn’t want to stick around to witness that.

“Get up,” he grumbles to the Girl, seizing a fistful of her tattered poncho in his fists and shoving her out of the room before him. He cautiously surveys the hallways and reseals the door, the reverberations of the Wookiee’s growling muffling some. “You’re going to show me where the kid is.”

The Girl is shoved, pulled, and dragged down the halls she navigates like a sixth sense. It wasn’t too long ago that she would traverse the halls sans restraints and without a Mandalorian’s vice grip on her mauled limb, a vibro-knife tucked into his adjacent leathers for leverage, though he didn’t require it; it brings a piddling of relief to clasp a weapon in unknown territories and especially around unreliable individuals. The Mandalorian is being unnecessarily rough with her—he knows this—considering she’s being so obedient, but it’s either this or he lets his guard down around her and he wasn’t willing to risk that—not again. 

“In here.” She gestures with a nod and Mando pushes her inside first, deeming it safe when she’s unharmed. She turns around with shock written on her face. “Are you serious? You’re fucking covered in beskar and you’re using  _ me  _ as a shield?!”

Mando gives her the cold shoulder and walks past her, crouching beside the Child laying on a medbay cot that’s far too large for his small body. He’s alive and breathing steadily, but still unresponsive; it eases the tension in his shoulders some but he tries not to let it get lost in his head. The Child had done this before, after all. Perhaps he’ll wake by the time they return to the Crest.

If they return.

The Girl clears her throat behind him. “I get it,” she groans. “What I did is inexcusable, but I’m not dying on this ship because you’re too busy brooding to think clearly.”

Brooding—that’s the word she chooses.

Not devastated or heartbroken. 

Brooding.

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

She retorts, “You’re mad at me, probably want to kill me.”

Tidal stirs within the abyss of his head, his veins, his core, and he strives to barricade it off from his actions—construct a dam to hold off the invasive waves of bad temper but he’s only one man. One man who can’t continue restraining himself. He’s so overloaded with emotions he can’t think straight let alone stop from doing something he might regret.

Mando’s hand weighs heavy across her collarbone and he sends her against the wall behind her, leaning in close and snuffing out her comfort like a feeble flame licking at a candle’s wick. Her jugular bobs with a thick swallow as she slinks against the wall, her breathing staggered underneath his glove. 

He sucks in a breath through his filters and his eyes dance her features precariously. She’s startled by his behaviour and refuses to look at his visor, concerned about what she may find or  _ won’t  _ find. Mando tilts her chin up with two fingers, savouring the sweet taste on his tongue upon looking into her eyes—those fucking eyes. They’re like a narcotic and he finds himself wanting to forgive her right here and now, forget the lies and secrecy between them, return to the Crest and continue what had been interrupted. Mando wants to vow to those eyes. Vow that he’s not going anywhere—that he’s committed to developing  _ this  _ further. He wants to reach around and free her of her tethers, listen to her fingertips dragging across Beskar and feel the increased beat in his chest when she lifts, right before the soft of her lips mould perfectly to his.

The vocoder produces a low hum, “I don’t know what I’m thinking. I trusted you; depended on you. And you  _ never  _ advised me of all this.”

“Mando,” she begins but he quickly shuts her down.

“Don’t. It can wait. The Child comes first.” Mando backs away from the Girl and sweeps the kid off the bed and into his arms, cradling him close against the blood-smeared beskar.

“Go,” Mando instructs her, waving the vibro-knife to the exit. “The cockpit. Show me.”

So she does and she guides him through the navigational controls—they’re more advanced in comparison to the Crest’s and it looks like a foreign language, but he blames that on the red waves in his vision and the boil in his veins—until he’s prompted the spacecraft to return to Tatooine and connected it to the auto-piloting systems. Supposedly the craft can land itself, if the Girl speaks the truth, which is optimal for Mando, allowing him to stalk through the hallways for unsuspecting occupants with the Girl never more than half a metre from his clutch. Not that he believed she would attempt to escape or lead him astray, but it gave him a sense of control of the situation.

“There you are!” Tika exclaims, rounding a corner and raising her blaster at the Girl ahead of him. 

She yelps in surprise as he tugs her against his chest and flips his back to face Tika just in time for a beam to ricochet off his back armour. The force of the blast stimulates his muscles to twitch around the still-healing lesion lodged below his shoulder blade and his grip on the Girl tightens in reaction. Tika fires another shot at him and it hits his pauldron this time, too close to flesh for his liking. 

Mando ushers the Girl behind a wall out of sight and uses his beskar to get closer to Tika just as he had back on the ridge with the Girl; using the majority of his armour to conceal the Child from her persistent firing. The lasers reflect off him with each pull of her trigger, she’s getting desperate as he closes in and shoots a final shot that whirrs over his shoulder pathetically. He slashes her arm with his knife causing her to drop the blaster to treat the wound, her claw harshly gripping against the leaking lesion. 

“Where are the others?” Mando questions with the vibrating blade against her neck.

She just scoffs at him and glares daggers through his visor. He doesn’t have the patience to deal with yet another stubborn girl—not when he needs to tend to the Child on the ground—and he plunges the blade through her chest, droplets of crimson cascading from the pulses. Tika slides along the wall and sits in a pile on the floor, quiet for what feels like the first time since he’d encountered her.

It’s brutal—he knows it, the Girl knows it, and the Child in his arms would know it too if he wasn’t unconscious.  _ That’s  _ a reminder that he did what needed to be done; fixing a wrong with a right. The kid can’t be put in danger, he’s too important to the Mandalorian; he’ll murder each lifeform on the spacecraft with just his vibro-knife to ensure his security if necessary. Nonetheless, he equips himself with Tika’s carbine for additional aid.

The Girl is smart and doesn’t mention it—doesn’t even pull out one of her famous quips about protecting her despite the circumstances—and he’s grateful for that, at least. It doesn’t change things, though.

“You! How did you-” Kur makes an appearance, the crewmates seemingly just lining up to be taken down. Mando will take that any day of the week. He’s not exactly in the mood to hunt each individual down. “Tika? Tika! You son of a… I’ll kill you!” Kur crunches his knuckles and rushes down the hall towards the trio. 

The Mandalorian aims Tika’s carbine at the Devaronian’s forehead, right between the protruding black horns, and he goes to squeeze; it’s like second nature at this point. Except the Girl bounds between either of them and interrupts Kur’s momentum from tackling Mando. She’s quite literally risking her life to stand before him, protect him from the onslaught of her ex-crewmate, but the fury in his fingertips has journeyed through his veins and flooded his rationality. There’s nothing he’s feeling except resentment and—maybe, possibly—an inkling of anguish but it’s suffocated underneath all the anger that he disregards it.

Kur doesn’t seem to mind whether it’s the Mandalorian or the Girl who he takes his feelings out on and he wraps his thin hands around her shoulders to thrust her to the ground, one of his boots coming to lay on her abdomen where he applies pressure and elicits groans from her. “Enough,” Mando sighs, realigning his barrel to his head.

“Why are you protecting her?” Kur asks, his boot still firmly planted on her. It makes his finger itch against the trigger. “She’ll only betray you as she did to us. Just wait and you’ll see. When you need her she’ll turn her back on you.”

“That’s not fucking true,” she groans, craning her head to look at Mando. “You know that’s not true!”

“Isn’t it? There’s something about you that’s just cursed. You bring everybody around you misfortune.”

Mando virtually  _ growls  _ at that, crinkling his brow underneath his helmet and gripping the hilt of the blaster with so much frustration it’ll leave it’s indentations on his flesh if he wasn’t wearing his gloves. “Get off her,” he orders.

Kur listens, not having much of a choice, and backs away from the bloodied Girl. It’s not until he’s far enough away that Mando squeezes the trigger without a second thought. The carbine is heavier than his blaster pistol and it’s got horrible stabilisation, but it gets the job done. Another body thumps to the ground and thick black blood rolls from the wound and down the red flesh of Kur’s bald head.

One left—that’s if he decides to spare the Wookiee’s life as the Girl pleaded.

“Come on,” Mando’s voice is softer now and he almost wants to kick himself for it.  _ Almost.  _ “We need to go.”

He aids her onto her feet and they continue to the rear of the ship. 

“Don’t underestimate Horne,” the Girl breaks the silence. “He’s good with a blaster. On par with you. He was trained to surpass me with a rifle.”

That blubbering human is ‘on par’ to him?

“Don’t make me laugh.”

The Girl gives him a look behind his back, unconfident and concerned, but she shuts her mouth to avoid drawing his directed wrath back at her. She’s exhausted, sore, and just wants to return to the Crest—find comfort in the passenger seat with Mando in the pilot’s where they both belonged. She wants to act as though the connection between them wasn’t mutilated and bloody, much like her arms. She wants to feel his hands on her again—gloves or no gloves, she didn’t care, she just wants  _ him _ —and the warmth of her blood dribbling down the length of her arm serves as a phantom touch of his hands. She swallows a lump in her throat and scuffs her boots along the ground, trudging behind the Mandalorian with heavy strides.

“What’re you doing?” she finally asks, stopping in the middle of a hallway. “I...I lied to you. Why’re you still…”

“We don’t have time for this.”

She sighs. “Please. I might not make it out of here.”

He turns, sharp edges of beskar piercing her gaze. She wonders what lay underneath, whether he’s all hard muscles or soft skin. His hands were rough from years of work, years of non-stop exhaustion, and his body had to be in similar conditions but she believes there’s a softness underneath all that steel; one she wants to bury herself in. “You’ll make it. Ship’s already beginning descent. We’ll get you aid when we reach ground,” he assures.

The Girl eyes the Child in his arms. “You should leave me here. Get out of here before Horne finds you. Get on the Crest and take him far away from here.”

“No.”

There wasn’t a reason to keep her around anymore, not after she had betrayed his trust, unless—

“I won’t abandon you.” He continues walking down the hallway, slightly slower for her to catch up. “I’m not like them.”

Mando decides not to tell her that he physically can’t turn his back on her; that she’s burrowed a den through the gaps of his beskar and made herself welcome to the warmth of his blood as a blanket and the cushioning of his heart a pillow, where she’ll slumber for eternity. Although the foreign weight made his lungs sore and his chest rumble, it’s a comforting sensation and he wasn’t ready to lose it just yet—he’d fixed things before, who’s to say he can’t repair the cracks of their unity.

“Get down.” 

She does as he asks and crouches behind a bolted couch beside him, though she’s not as graceful as he is and more so tumbles to the ground than lowers herself. “Ow,” she groans and readjusts herself. 

He listens intently through his activated sonic detectors and concentrates on the vibrations of heavy footsteps smacking against durasteel. It had to be Horne, with the other two deceased and rotting in their wake and Bookoo— _ hopefully— _ restrained, didn't leave any other options unless there’s a fifth unknown crew member. 

“Stay here.”

The Girl clinks the chain of her restraints and mumbles, “Don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Does the hallway loop around?” he asks, peeking his head down another corridor he had yet to explore.

“Yeah.” It’s not the greatest plan but it’s decent enough. If he’s such a good shot, it’ll be smarter to get the advantage from behind. “Wait, the kid. Leave him here. I’ll look after him.”

She looks directly through his visor and into his eyes, just like on the Crest, and it makes his heart leap over a hurdle of missing beats. None of his morals of logistics can protest against her claims—not when she’s looking at him so rawly.

The Child squirms for a moment before settling back into the crook of his forearm, his little green forehead wrinkled as he sleeps. The Mandalorian sighs and places the Child beside her, tucked between the sofa and a wall to prop him up. “Turn around,” he instructs, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. She twists her body away from him and he whips out his vibro-knife, locking the tip between the manacle’s chainlink and stimulates the steel enough for it to shatter a link. She sighs as her hands come out ahead of her in a stretch, the strands firmly fixed around her wrists with half a chain dangling from either one. “It’s the best I can do regarding the conditions.”

The Girl shares a nod with him and sweetly says, “Thank you, Mando.”

Mando returns the nod, glances at the kid once more, and then trudges down the hallway in pursuit of Horne. Their ship is unreasonably large for its body count and he must’ve passed at least two dozen rooms before he’s in familiar territory; a different perspective, but familiar. The neglected game of holochess sits on the table to his right, and to his left, Horne stalking the corridor with his back against Mando. He’s nearing the couch where the Girl and Child are.

Mando fiddles with Tika’s carbine, lifting the heavy weight and aiming at the back of Horne’s head. It rattles in his hands and he scowls when Horne notices him lurking behind the corner, but he doesn’t advance or aim his own weapon at him. Instead, he gives the Mandalorian a wicked smirk and bounds down the hallway in the Girl’s direction.  _ Shit.  _ The lens of the carbine trails him but his movements are too fluid, too similar to the Girl’s, and he can’t fire a shot without it accidentally ricocheting and impaling either her or the kid. 

Horne stoops behind the couch out of Mando’s line of sight and the Girl’s abrupt yelling and grunting gets him back on his feet, his vibro-knife tightly clasped in his palm in replacement of the useless carbine. He never should have utilised such a bulky weapon in a space this cramped.

An echo of a blaster rings through the room and Mando’s heart plunges to his stomach at the distinctive sound mixed with more suffering moans. His legs are unstable underneath him like he’d been shocked with his Amban rifle; heavy, slow, and twitching with each of his steps but he continues. Keeps moving until he can see the scene before him and it’s not pretty, far from it, but the Girl and Child are alive. They’re okay. 

She’s in shock, her eyes trembling over the corpse of her ex-crewmate ahead of her, Horne’s blaster laying her quivering hands. “It’s all right.” Mando soothes her by plucking the blaster out of her grasp. “He’s dead.”

“It’s not that,” she chuckles in surprise and leans against the couch behind her, revealing the blade poking out from her abdomen. “Bastard.”

“Did you - is that…”

“Mmmh.” She nods. “Grade A blade with my name on it.”

She’s committed to her stubborn nature, it seems, even on the brink of death. It makes Mando want to claw out tufts of his hair until he glances her over and takes in how  _ scared  _ she looks—forehead slick with beads of sweat, eyebrows scrunched in agony, bottom lip abused by her teeth, and her eyes. Those eyes. They’re so fidgety, so desperate to not look at him. 

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” she mumbles and offers an imposter of a smile, the curve of her lips not quite reaching that same height he’s used to seeing.  _ She’s smiling at him. Why is she smiling? _

“No,” he growls and lowers himself beside her, “No you’re not. Let me see.”

“Don’t,” she begs, her hands unsteady against his. “Just get outta here. Take the kid and go.”

How can she suggest that? How could she even think that?

“We’ll land within the minute. Th-the hatch...it’s down the corridor, take a left and then a right.”

“Stop it.”

The Girl’s teeth poke through the gaps of her lips as she offers another reassuring smile to him and it makes his stomach churn. She’s bleeding out—dying—and she’s consoling  _ him.  _ He’s not letting that happen; she’s not to die here on this craft. His tan leathers hoist her tattered poncho up just enough to examine the blade’s point of entrance, lodged between a breathing slit of her flesh leaking blood down her side. His hands press around the wound and she groans, the soft curve of her lips transforming into an outstretched frown and her unwrinkled brow dons lines he never knew she possessed. It’s tough to see her in so much pain. Pain that he’s triggering.

“Fuck - fuck, stop,” she whines and convulses underneath the weight of his hands. “Gods, can’t you let me die in peace?”

Perhaps he’d laugh if he wasn’t biting his lip so hard that it’s beginning to tear, the metallic of blood battering against his numbing taste buds. “Where do they keep their medical supplies?” She mumbles over her response and her head is beginning to lull to the side as it feels weighed on her shoulders, but he repositions her against him so she doesn’t collapse to the cold durasteel. “ _ Vaii, Mesh’la? _ Where?”

She groans against his beskar and inches closer to the cool of the steel. It’s refreshing on her flushed face and lowers her temperature moderately, enough for her to focus on her breathing and the hands still firmly pressed to the wound in false hope it’ll stop the bleeding. If this is how she dies, it’s not all that bad—being in the arms of the Mandalorian brought serenity, like she hadn’t lived a life of death and transgression. She imagines living a decent life with the Mandalorian, the Child too, on the outskirts of some neglected planet where he needn’t disguise his face with Beskar.

Her Mandalorian—what a life that would be.

“They don’t have an-y,” she answers. “Didn’t like spending cre-dits. Lucky if you find some measly protein cubes on this pile of-”

“There has to be something. There has to be a medpac or-” Mando angles his helmet to the Child. “The Child. He could help you.”

She shakes her head stubbornly. Now wasn’t the time to be stubborn. “He’s out of it, Mando. Besides, I-I’m not letting him save me when I nearly… I-it’s fucked up.”

The Mandalorian thinks, uses every single atom in his being to concentrate on a plan of action to save the Girl, and he comes up with one horrible, unintelligent idea—and it might just work.

But first, the Girl’s bleeding—he needs to get it maintained somewhat. “Here.” He readjusts her against the wall beside the Child and clasps her hands in his to hover over her lesion. “Apply pressure. Don’t remove the blade.”

She does as she’s told, thankfully listening to the Mandalorian instead of her stubborn subconscious, and rams her palms against the wound, to which she cries out in pain and digs the heel of her boot into the ground. 

His vibro-knife’s blade slashes through the thick of his cloak in a frenzy, his leathers ripping a chunk of the material from behind him until there’s plenty in his clutch. “This’ll hurt,” he warns. She nods in preparation and he tightly wraps the segmented cloak around the deepest slash on her arm, the blood oozing out at the slightest disturbance and it’s nothing short of undiluted torture. 

“Shit. Shit, shit. Stop. Please, Mando. Stop. I can’t…”

He comforts her, “Just a little more.” Mando continues bandaging her arm, attempting to not let her pleading get to him but it’s so close to untangling those knots he’d put up as a barrier. The cloak fastens into a bond against the wound and she groans one last time before her eyelids latch close and her hand limps against her stomach to collect the crimson between her fingers.

“ _ Mesh’la _ ,” Mando whispers, using the untainted backs of his gloves to stroke her cheek. She doesn’t respond, not even when he shakes her shoulders; her head just languidly rolls side-to-side from the momentum. His voice is broken like a shattered star in the night sky; it’s glimmer drained leaving a core of rough edges and sharp gelidness. “ _ Mesh’la _ , come on. Don’t d- just… I’ll -- I’ll be back.”

He’s reluctant to tear away from her. As though if he does, she’ll be gone before he returns. She might be, he realises, she’s lost an outstanding volume of blood from her arm and even more now with the blade in her stomach. He scolds himself, a thick layer of mixed feelings of guilt and hurt laying upon his shoulders, but he’s not going to waste valuable time just waiting for her to pass.

The Mandalorian navigates the memorised corridors, his feet fast and his strides long, until he steps in front of a blocked door. There's an angry wild growling on the other side and he takes a deep breath as he unseals and steps foot inside, his hands extended in a friendly manner. 

“She -- she needs your help, Bookoo.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "grrraooowww gruhhh!" - stay on target!  
> "ohh haa" - okay  
> "vaii, mesh'la?" - where, beautiful?
> 
> Let me know your thoughts on this chapter! It's not one of my best works tbh. I really struggled with this one but hopefully, it's just a road bump and I'll get over it.

**Author's Note:**

> dins-creed on tumblr. Come say hi! I don't bite.


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